But how often do you see a "line in" port nowadays? Line-in ports are stereo, high impedance and accept a signal of about 1V peak-to-peak. Microphone ports are mono, low impedance and accept a signal of about 5mV peak-to-peak.
I did have the idea for a device which would faithfully emulate an "old-fashioned" sound card (i.e. one that expects unencrypted, raw PCM data arriving on the system bus) to the satisfaction of an OS, but store the raw PCM data in (its own on-board) RAM or FLASH rather than handing it off to the usual DAC and DUX. The only way for Microsoft to defeat that would be to withdraw support for all the "real" sound cards that it emulates. That would probably leave them open to prosecution.
I still think that it's going to take a whole spate of expensive MP3 players and computers being taken back to the store on grounds of "brokenness" (because they won't play people's purchased tracks) before anyone in authority realises what is really going on.
I had an idea that social networking information might be highly valuable to corrupt governments. With some social networking data about each citizen, and a draconian Digital restrictions Management scheme, democracy can be laid to rest once and for all. Elections can be held in which every citizen can verify their own vote in a published list -- yet the final result of the election was decided before a ballot was cast.
Why post-election verifiability is meaningless or, how even an open ballot can be subverted
A government already in power is in the ideal position to subvert an election even where every registered voter votes (zero abstentions), even in spite of receipts and even in spite of the existence of a published list of everyone's name, address and who voted for whom (hereinafter The Big List). The Big List is -- or at least will be spun as being -- highly sensitive information. There won't be any paper copies anywhere, in case they get stolen by foreign terrorists or direct marketers. You will be grudgingly allowed to look at it, strictly for the purpose of verifying that your own vote is correct. Don't expect for a second that it won't be protected by Digital Restrictions Management: you won't be able to print or save it without violating the EUCD or US DMCA. Anyway, possession of a hard copy could be made a separate offence in its own right (since it might be used to discriminate against people in illegal ways; also, it's information that might be useful to terrorists, or some such).
All it would take is (1) for The Big List to be made available only online, with Digital Restrictions Management technology, and accessible only via the use of a personal "security code" in order to "ensure that sensitive information is not misused"; and (2) for a combination of intrusive and less-intrusive surveillance measures to be used to determine everyone's Social Network (i.e. who their friends, relations and work colleagues are).
Run the election as normal and count the votes fairly. If your chosen candidate wins, stop right now. If anyone else wins, you need to adjust the figures just enough to create a favourable result which incorporates a sufficient majority to be unlikely to be challenged.
Now, when a voter logs on to see the results, they see a subtly altered version of The Big List. Their own vote is rendered accurately, as are the votes of everyone in their Social Network. The only votes altered are those of people outside the visitor's Social Network.
In other words, I might log in to see The Big List and see that my ex-coal-miner grandad voted for Labour (the winners), my posh aunt voted Conservative (the party who actually polled the most votes), and that dippy tart with the blue hair who lives in my street voted for the Green party -- exactly as I would have expected. To make the figures fit, a lot of Conservative votes will have to be changed to Labour votes. But on the version of the record that I am seeing -- and remember, they know it's me seeing it because of my personal security code -- all the changed votes came from people who, according to the Social Networks database, are strangers to me. Someone else might very likely log in and see my aunt as having voted Labour; but not if, according to the Social Networks database, they know me or her.
If a friend is with me when I check my vote, they will see their vote recorded correctly -- unless The Authorities don't know of our friendship and their vote happens to be one of the ones that get altered. Still, when they get home and check it on their own computer, it will show up right. If they call The Authorities and make it successfully through the "press one if....., press two if....." menus, they will be asked for their details, told the correct vote and that my computer must have been faulty, and probably believe that. If they later check on another friend's computer, and that other friend is properly listed as a k
Maybe they would migrate to Linux but why would you want then, They are computer-backward folks who have not updated their equipment. They will be a support nightmare.
All you need is the root password to their box, their IP address {if it's a static one; otherwise you'll have to talk them through the incredibly complex process of opening up an xterm and typing/sbin/ifconfig} and sshd running. As long as their router is behaving {swallow the extra cost of a ZyXel, you won't even know it's there} and their PC is actually capable of starting up, you'll be able to log in remotely and fix it.
In fact, there's a whole business opportunity for the making. Open a trade account with a ZyXel {no, I don't work for them; but they have always worked for me} vendor, and become an ADSL reseller. Learn how to spell either apt-get or emerge, depending upon your preference. It's like teaching an instrument: you only have to stay one lesson ahead of your pupils. If you have a Windows PC in your workshop, you can use it for converting MS Word documents to RTF and thence to OpenOffice. If you're really keen, get several ISDN lines and a Digium card, install Asterisk and sell VOIP-to-POTS / POTS-to-VOIP calls cheaper than Skype.
Additionally why do you want to encourage them to use legacy hardware? It uses up more electricity to get the job done than modern hardware. Makes the user less productive. Why encourage that.
Running new hardware uses a little bit less energy than running old hardware, but not as much as you think. Power supplies have actually got slightly less efficient, in the name of making them a few pence cheaper per unit. Anyway, manufacturing new hardware uses a hell of a lot more energy than keeping old hardware going. I'll leave you to look up the figures and estimate where the "breakeven point" is {i.e. how long would you have to run a computer before the total energy used in powering it matched and began to exceed the total energy already used in manufacturing it}.
I wonder how much success you would have, taking a media player back to the shop on the grounds that it was "broken" (i.e. it didn't play the tracks which you had paid good money to download) when in actual fact the brokenness was in the DRM schemes?
I think you might be in with a chance if it made it as far as a Court of Law. I doubt you'd be able to find a jury of twelve people who understood what "digital restrictions management" is. At least Beta and VHS cassettes were visually distinguible. The end result might be a chilling effect, with stores not daring to stock portable devices lest they be accused of misleading customers.
Well, I had an idea about that: Buy a Flash-based WMA+DRM player. Interface the USB port to your motherboard's front USB connector, the line-out to your motherboard's CD-ROM analogue-in connector, and the keyswitches to the Centronics port. Mount as a USB mass storage device. Send some files to the player. Start playback by setting the appropriate bit in the printer port.
For extra bonus points, remove the player's Flash chip and interface the player directly to the motherboard's memory.
To steal all the other players' points, win the game and set off all the fireworks, find a way to read out and disassemble the player's firmware. This probably will be much easier to hack than the equivalent Windows software.
I hate the idea of the DMCA as much as the next person, but I do think the story is sensationalising matters.
The text of the DMCA {as I have seen it -- I am no American} seems clearly to state that it does not prejudice anybody's right to Fair Use. As long as there is a ruling somewhere that format shifting constitutes fair use, the DMCA has not changed this.
I reluctantly got into vi back in the early 1990s, after being spoilt by the wonderful text editors available on VAX/VMS. Then I promptly forgot all about it -- never even had a fling with ELVIS on MS-DOS -- until discovering Linux sometime in 1999 or 2000. My favourite console editor used to be AEE; then I discovered pine, and hence pico. Now I can't live without nano. There's even a vi command built into BusyBox.
Ah, OLWM. I remember that fondly..... OpenWindows on a Sun SparcStation was my first experience of Unix + GUI, in about 1991 or 92. Having already used first VAX/VMS (nice but verbose) and then Unix without a GUI (powerful but cryptic), I could appreciate exactly how the GUI layer was sitting on top of the OS.
Was that actually X or some bastardised proprietary fork?
It's nice on a fast machine, but tediously slow on anything under 2GHz. I do like Window Maker. It's a bit different than you probably were expecting, but I think it's a bit truer to what X used to be like before everyone started trying to turn it into Windows.
One litre of diesel fuel contains more joules of energy than one litre of petrol (gasoline). However, in order to burn it fully and so release all that energy, it requires more air. Diesel engines therefore have larger displacements than equivalently-powered petrol engines; a runabout that ordinarily has a 1.2 petrol engine might have a 1.6 or even 1.8 in its diesel counterpart.
Although the extra cubes make it sound as though a diesel engine ought to use more fuel, this is not the case since the fuel-air ratio is adjusted correspondingly. A diesel engine draws only air (not fuel-air mixture) into the cylinder and compresses this. A charge of fuel is injected into the cylinder, where the heat from the compressed air ignites it.
Diesels also used to be more expensive because they need five gears (diesel engines have a more sharply-defined peak in the power/speed graph). But all cars have five gears nowadays; I've even seen six on some performance cars.
PHP takes care to keep things consistent, which is important for easing beginners in gently; Perl is not afraid to eschew consistency where it makes sense to do so. For instance, PHP's regex matching and substitution functions, derived from Perl, are incredibly tedious. In Perl, you're likely to be doing a lot of regex matches: the syntax is such that you just drop 'em in, and let the parser worry about them. No other language I've encountered lets you do that. Even in Python you have to jump through hoops to do what Perl makes simple, and Java seems to go all out to discourage you from bothering with regular expressions.
Some things about Perl are a bit finicky, especially where they involve getting close to the metal. Take for instance the four-argument select function (the one for seeing which file descriptors are ready to present data, expecting data or have just done something they shouldn't, not the one you use for selecting a filehandle for output.) It expects its arguments to be bitmasks created with pack "i", $bits -- you can't just use, say, integers and have them automagically turned into bitmasks. While that sounds a bit un-Perl-like, you have to remember that there are 8999 integers represented by 4-byte strings (and so indistinguible from 32-bit bitmasks). What you really should do is create a wrapper function around select, which takes its parameters (and returns its results) in a more convenient form for the program you are writing.
I've never understood the point of the liquids ban. The idea of terrorists mixing two or more liquids to create an explosive substance sounds plausible the first time you hear it, but the longer you think about it, the more you realise, it just won't fly.
For one thing, it seems to me that making up an explosive mixture demands rather better facilities than are available in the average aeroplane. I'm no expert {I only got a B in my chemistry A-level in 1999}, but it's hardly likely to be sufficient just to flush the two ingredients down the toilet and hope they mix in the holding tank. Things that look as though they work in films, don't necessarily have to work in real life.
For another thing, the ban doesn't make any sense {unless you are a vendor of overpriced bottled water, in which it makes every sense}. Baby milk is fine; well, what's to stop a would-be terrorist from taking a swig of some liquid disguised as baby milk? If they really believe in their Cause, they'll be able to train themself not to grimace. For that matter, what's to stop a would-be terrorist from swallowing some liquid and puking it up; or injecting some liquid into his bladder and then peeing it out?
Instead let me propose a more radical solution. Establish a secular state {this, of course, will mean that the Church that was founded on the principle of easy access to divorce, will have one final divorce to attend to}. Withdraw all state support to religious organisations of any flavour overseas and remove charitable status from any religious group in Britain. Refuse to recognise the sovereignty of theocracies.
It sounds harsh; but at the end of the day, the "nice" and "nasty" sides of religion are utterly inseparable, and the loss of one is an acceptable price to be free of the other. Besides which, there are thousands of gods that the so-called "moderate" christians, jews and muslims don't believe in -- what difference will one more make?
You're correct. The necessary "written permission" needn't be the GPL -- it could be a separate agreement altogether. However, nobody but the copyright holder {or, in exceptional circumstances, the courts} has the power to grant such permission, and distributing GPL software without permission is no different to distributing any other copyrighted software without permission. Which is why the permission under the GPL originates from the copyright holder -- and even if you didn't receive a copy of the text of the GPL with the program {which is against the GPL conditions unless you specifically requested that}, in fact even if the copy you received is legally considered infringing, you still have all the permissions granted by the GPL.
He does not hold the copyright in the work in question, he did not comply with the conditions of the GPL, he did not pay for the commercial licence and his acts of distribution go well beyond Fair Dealing. Therefore, however you look at it, he is in violation of copyright.
Get two cheap AVO-knockoffs, one of which must have an AC current range. Measure the voltage across the appliance and the current flowing through it. (Note; you will inevitably be measuring either the current drawn by the voltmeter or the voltage drop due to the ammeter. Neither matters much with modern instruments.) Multiply the current by the voltage to get the power in watts, divide by 1000 to get kW, and multiply this by the time in hours to get Units. (1 Unit == 1 kWh == 3.6MJ). For geek points, interface all this lot to a computer. Since you'll be dealing with mains, your circuit will need to be optically isolated. I recommend to build the whole measuring circuit "live", and use an ADC with a synchronous serial output. This way you only need clock and MUX drive (voltage / current selection) in, and data out; you can use just one dual and one single opto-isolator on the printer port. If you don't understand the above, don't try it.
I have also seen standalone plug-in power analysers with a pass-through socket and an LCD showing, in turn as you press a button, the voltage, frequency, current, power, time and energy consumption. They aren't as accurate as a real laboratory instrument, but you get what you pay for.
And not all GPL software is "free" as in price. I can make a software package under the GPL (independently or a derived package), but not distribute it to anyone but you for $1000. As long as I give you the source code along with the binaries, I am complying with Section 3a) of the GPL and do not need to provide it to any 3rd party 3b). Thus, it was always "free as in speech" but was never "free as in beer".
However, once one person has paid the $1000 for a copy of the program, there is then nothing to stop that person from distributing the same program for $10 {they'll break even after selling 100 copies} -- or even for nothing. This effectively places an upper limit on the price that can be charged for a copy of a program {the unavoidable costs of the act of distribution impose a lower limit}. Even if nobody has $1000 upfront, a thousand people could get together and each put in $1 to buy one copy. Thanks to the distribution rights afforded by the GPL, they would be permitted to make another 999 copies -- so, depending upon how you look at it, either everyone receives $1000 of software for $1, or someone is charging $1000 for $1 of software.
Now, that's how a real Free Market works -- and it's interesting to see just how much it winds up some of the supposed proponents of Capitalism and the Free Market {what they're really in favour of is oligopoly, cartels and protection from competition by upstarts seeking to enter the market}.
There is no such thing as "a violation of the GPL". What these people have violated is copyright law.
In RMS's ideal world {and mine for that matter}, it would be law that every piece of software had to come with Source Code {this being necessary for the meaningful exercise of Freedoms One and Three}, either at the time it was obtained or anytime later on request; and failure to supply the Source Code on request would be punishable. Source Code isn't the only requirement, but we're simplifying a little here. Anyway, Freedoms Zero and Two can be taken by force if necessary; at the present time, it is orders of magnitude more difficult {though mathematically not impossible} to obtain Source Code by forcible techniques.
The GPL is a sort of "second best" approach, a way to approximate the ideal situation using existing laws.
Existing copyright law already says that if you want to distribute copies of something someone else originally made and which is still under protection of copyright, you usually need permission in writing from that person. The law actually gives you some limited right to make copies in the name of "fair dealing" or "fair use", which nothing can take away -- even if you promise not to exercise your statutory rights, you can go ahead and do so anyway without fear of repercussions. The other person is a sucker for believing in a worthless promise.
Now, if you have written a program and want people to use it, it's clear that you have to make some provision for distributing copies. This is where copyright law comes into play. If, as a fine upstanding citizen, you want to ensure the Four Freedoms for everyone who uses your program, then you can give permission to distribute copies of your program so long as they preserve the Four Freedoms for everyone who receives a copy from them.
The GPL is a letter of permission to do things above and beyond what the Law of the Land allows, on certain conditions. What it basically says is that: you get Freedom Zero whatever happens, and you get Freedom Two if and only if you don't seek to deny any subsequent recipient of the program from you any of the Four Freedoms. If you don't comply with the conditions of the GPL, then it doesn't give you any permission to do anything, and normal copyright law applies.
If you make a derivative work of a GPL program and don't show it to anyone else, then the Law of the land says you can do that: it's Fair Dealing. However, once you overstep the bounds of Fair Dealing, you require written permission. And the GPL only affords permission if you comply with certain conditions. If you do not comply with the conditions of the GPL, then you are in violation of copyright law.
That depends entirely upon whether you consider a transsexual as a lifelong (woman|man) who was born bearing a greater resemblance to a (boy|girl), or a former (man|woman) who was changed into a (woman|man) by surgery. And that's really their own business anyway.
[Rationale for ordering of gender-specific nouns: there are numerically more male-to-female transsexuals than female-to-male, therefore the earlier form is statistically more likely to be correct.]
If it comes up in metamoderation, I promise I'll M2 that "Flamebait" unfair.
Firefox and OpenOffice can trace their lineage directly back to closed-source software (Netscape Navigator and StarOffice respectively). As such, they contain many examples of lousy programming practice, simply because nobody ever thought that code would see the light of day. That's just what you get when you set more store by "on time" than you set by "right". Look at alternative browsers and office applications to see how unbloated they can be made. In defence to the Mozilla people, it is possible to reduce the size of Firefox if you know what you're doing; DSL managed to get a very small executable that they can still call Firefox. OpenOffice really needs doing again from scratch, though.
I would have thought ARM {pre-Thumb} would be about the simplest processor to implement. Basically, at its heart is a matrix of AND-OR selection logic, which allows you to do cool stuff like shifting and crementing on the way in and out. Bits within the opcode determine directly which operation to perform, the source and destination registers, any shifting, pre/post in/decrements, the order of operands {only the physically-second operand can be munged; but for non-commutive operations like subtractions, the logical order is reversible. SBCS R0, R2, R1 can be written as RSCS R0, R1, R2}, the conditionality {every ARM instruction is conditional, though there is an "ALWAYS" condition and even a "NEVER" condition whose use is deprectated} and whether or not to update the condition flags from the current instruction. There's only one branch instruction, which simply stores the return address in a register. You can build an ARM clone out of 74HC TTL ICs {which is what Steve Furber and Sophie [then Roger] Wilson actually did, after proving the instruction set on an emulator based around an expanded BBC Model B}. The logic is obvious from the instruction set, so you certainly won't be violating any trade secrets; and you can change enough details to get around any patent issues without affecting the functionality much {invert the sense of one of the condition code bits?}.
ARM is also inherently low-power, providing plenty of instructions per joule.
Nice Hitler troll, but "Mein Kampf" is not banned. You can buy it and read it. The copyright belongs to the State of Bavaria and is to all intents and purposes unenforcible. The book is due to enter the Public Domain soon, if not already..... you might find a copy on Project Gutenberg. It's a bit..... challenging, I think is the word used nowadays. Clearly the work of a smart person, though equally clear that <litotes>he has a bee in his bonnet.</litotes>
I think you'll find that the phone's main processor is controlling the switched-mode power supply for battery charging. Instead of a comparator, a few resistors and a hefty transistor, they use an ADC and some spare CPU cycles to operate said hefty transistor. The idea is that as soon as there's enough voltage just to power the processor at all, it can deal with the whole business of interrupting and restarting the charging current to the supply capacitor {which is how a conventional SMPS regulates its voltage}. I first observed something like this about 7 years ago in a piece of vehicle electronics, containing a microprocessor. It used some kind of charge pump {i.e. where capacitors are alternately charged in parallel then discharged in series} to generate a higher supply voltage than the battery, to feed an op-amp amplifying the voltage drop across a resistance of a few milliohms to monitor current {no op-amp can amplify signals which are hard up against either supply rail, so you always need a supply just out of range. Easy to obtain in a mains appliance, harder in a battery appliance}. The transistors, diodes and capacitors were obvious, but damned if I could find the oscillator that ran it. Turned out it was a pin on the processor.....
My mobile is a Sony Ericsson, bought before Sony did that scandalous rootkit thing {but then I'm immune to that anyway, not having any Windows PCs}.
Well, seeing as I have a mortgage, there's precious little point me having any savings. They would never, ever earn as much interest as I'm paying out on my mortgage -- it's how the whole banking system works. If I had any spare money, it would go straight into paying off the mortgage sooner. If I want to buy something online, I write a cheque or buy a postal order. This gives me some additional time to think carefully about the purchase. Do I really need it, or will I merely be contributing to the waste disposal time bomb? Might it be a better idea to swallow the cost of patronising a local retailer?
About your sig: I have two filament bulbs in my house. One is in the understairs cupboard, controlled by a microswitch which keeps it OFF when the door is closed. The other is in a bedside lamp controlled by a dimmer switch, and is about eight years old: the dimmer switch is a "turn off" one rather than a "push off" one, so it gets a gentle start. All the rest are energy-saving compact fluorescents. My central heating has a combi boiler {no hot water tank} with electronic ignition {no wasteful pilot burner} and TRVs all around. I don't think there's a lot of energy left I can save! I wholeheartedly endorse your campaign. However, I have recently noticed a lot of cheap imported table lamps with 14mm screw fittings, instead of the usual 22mm push-and-twist fitting. It would be nice to see either some cheap energy saver bulbs with 14mm screw threads, or a ban on lamps which are incompatible with energy saver bulbs. Also, the web site needs to be made more obviously British {try replacing the "dollar sign" stylised bulb filaments with pound signs for a start}.
On-line banking isn't worth it. I know exactly how much money goes into my bank account each month, because I know how much I get paid each month, and how much I might have paid in through the hole-in-the-wall machine. No money gets into my account any other way except a negligible amount of interest. I know exactly how much money comes out of my bank each month, because I stand right there at the HITW and transfer it to my wallet every time I make a withdrawal, I know what cheques I have signed, and no money comes out any other way. If I was really bothered, I could subtract the second subtotal from the first and keep a running total; but as long as it's always smaller, that's all that matters to me. My bank send me a statement as soon as I have performed enough transactions to fill a page, and the HITW has a button to check my balance if I am desperate to know while out and about. I don't really need to know exactly how much money is in the bank until I am ready to draw some out; and then I will have to go to the HITW anyway to do that, so I might as well check my balance right then. On-line banking can't print pound notes, nor can it scan cheques and pay them into my account. And since deposits and withdrawals are the only two reasons why I would ever have to go to a bank anyway, what's the point?
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But how often do you see a "line in" port nowadays? Line-in ports are stereo, high impedance and accept a signal of about 1V peak-to-peak. Microphone ports are mono, low impedance and accept a signal of about 5mV peak-to-peak.
I did have the idea for a device which would faithfully emulate an "old-fashioned" sound card (i.e. one that expects unencrypted, raw PCM data arriving on the system bus) to the satisfaction of an OS, but store the raw PCM data in (its own on-board) RAM or FLASH rather than handing it off to the usual DAC and DUX. The only way for Microsoft to defeat that would be to withdraw support for all the "real" sound cards that it emulates. That would probably leave them open to prosecution.
I still think that it's going to take a whole spate of expensive MP3 players and computers being taken back to the store on grounds of "brokenness" (because they won't play people's purchased tracks) before anyone in authority realises what is really going on.
I had an idea that social networking information might be highly valuable to corrupt governments. With some social networking data about each citizen, and a draconian Digital restrictions Management scheme, democracy can be laid to rest once and for all. Elections can be held in which every citizen can verify their own vote in a published list -- yet the final result of the election was decided before a ballot was cast.
....., press two if ....." menus, they will be asked for their details, told the correct vote and that my computer must have been faulty, and probably believe that. If they later check on another friend's computer, and that other friend is properly listed as a k
Why post-election verifiability is meaningless
or, how even an open ballot can be subverted
A government already in power is in the ideal position to subvert an election even where every registered voter votes (zero abstentions), even in spite of receipts and even in spite of the existence of a published list of everyone's name, address and who voted for whom (hereinafter The Big List). The Big List is -- or at least will be spun as being -- highly sensitive information. There won't be any paper copies anywhere, in case they get stolen by foreign terrorists or direct marketers. You will be grudgingly allowed to look at it, strictly for the purpose of verifying that your own vote is correct. Don't expect for a second that it won't be protected by Digital Restrictions Management: you won't be able to print or save it without violating the EUCD or US DMCA. Anyway, possession of a hard copy could be made a separate offence in its own right (since it might be used to discriminate against people in illegal ways; also, it's information that might be useful to terrorists, or some such).
All it would take is (1) for The Big List to be made available only online, with Digital Restrictions Management technology, and accessible only via the use of a personal "security code" in order to "ensure that sensitive information is not misused"; and (2) for a combination of intrusive and less-intrusive surveillance measures to be used to determine everyone's Social Network (i.e. who their friends, relations and work colleagues are).
Run the election as normal and count the votes fairly. If your chosen candidate wins, stop right now. If anyone else wins, you need to adjust the figures just enough to create a favourable result which incorporates a sufficient majority to be unlikely to be challenged.
Now, when a voter logs on to see the results, they see a subtly altered version of The Big List. Their own vote is rendered accurately, as are the votes of everyone in their Social Network. The only votes altered are those of people outside the visitor's Social Network.
In other words, I might log in to see The Big List and see that my ex-coal-miner grandad voted for Labour (the winners), my posh aunt voted Conservative (the party who actually polled the most votes), and that dippy tart with the blue hair who lives in my street voted for the Green party -- exactly as I would have expected. To make the figures fit, a lot of Conservative votes will have to be changed to Labour votes. But on the version of the record that I am seeing -- and remember, they know it's me seeing it because of my personal security code -- all the changed votes came from people who, according to the Social Networks database, are strangers to me. Someone else might very likely log in and see my aunt as having voted Labour; but not if, according to the Social Networks database, they know me or her.
If a friend is with me when I check my vote, they will see their vote recorded correctly -- unless The Authorities don't know of our friendship and their vote happens to be one of the ones that get altered. Still, when they get home and check it on their own computer, it will show up right. If they call The Authorities and make it successfully through the "press one if
In fact, there's a whole business opportunity for the making. Open a trade account with a ZyXel {no, I don't work for them; but they have always worked for me} vendor, and become an ADSL reseller. Learn how to spell either apt-get or emerge, depending upon your preference. It's like teaching an instrument: you only have to stay one lesson ahead of your pupils. If you have a Windows PC in your workshop, you can use it for converting MS Word documents to RTF and thence to OpenOffice. If you're really keen, get several ISDN lines and a Digium card, install Asterisk and sell VOIP-to-POTS / POTS-to-VOIP calls cheaper than Skype.
Running new hardware uses a little bit less energy than running old hardware, but not as much as you think. Power supplies have actually got slightly less efficient, in the name of making them a few pence cheaper per unit. Anyway, manufacturing new hardware uses a hell of a lot more energy than keeping old hardware going. I'll leave you to look up the figures and estimate where the "breakeven point" is {i.e. how long would you have to run a computer before the total energy used in powering it matched and began to exceed the total energy already used in manufacturing it}.
I wonder how much success you would have, taking a media player back to the shop on the grounds that it was "broken" (i.e. it didn't play the tracks which you had paid good money to download) when in actual fact the brokenness was in the DRM schemes?
I think you might be in with a chance if it made it as far as a Court of Law. I doubt you'd be able to find a jury of twelve people who understood what "digital restrictions management" is. At least Beta and VHS cassettes were visually distinguible. The end result might be a chilling effect, with stores not daring to stock portable devices lest they be accused of misleading customers.
Well, I had an idea about that: Buy a Flash-based WMA+DRM player. Interface the USB port to your motherboard's front USB connector, the line-out to your motherboard's CD-ROM analogue-in connector, and the keyswitches to the Centronics port. Mount as a USB mass storage device. Send some files to the player. Start playback by setting the appropriate bit in the printer port.
For extra bonus points, remove the player's Flash chip and interface the player directly to the motherboard's memory.
To steal all the other players' points, win the game and set off all the fireworks, find a way to read out and disassemble the player's firmware. This probably will be much easier to hack than the equivalent Windows software.
I hate the idea of the DMCA as much as the next person, but I do think the story is sensationalising matters.
The text of the DMCA {as I have seen it -- I am no American} seems clearly to state that it does not prejudice anybody's right to Fair Use. As long as there is a ruling somewhere that format shifting constitutes fair use, the DMCA has not changed this.
I reluctantly got into vi back in the early 1990s, after being spoilt by the wonderful text editors available on VAX/VMS. Then I promptly forgot all about it -- never even had a fling with ELVIS on MS-DOS -- until discovering Linux sometime in 1999 or 2000. My favourite console editor used to be AEE; then I discovered pine, and hence pico. Now I can't live without nano. There's even a vi command built into BusyBox.
You've been down to the lower (higher?) levels on Nethack, haven't you?
Ah, OLWM. I remember that fondly ..... OpenWindows on a Sun SparcStation was my first experience of Unix + GUI, in about 1991 or 92. Having already used first VAX/VMS (nice but verbose) and then Unix without a GUI (powerful but cryptic), I could appreciate exactly how the GUI layer was sitting on top of the OS.
Was that actually X or some bastardised proprietary fork?
I think I'm going off KDE.
It's nice on a fast machine, but tediously slow on anything under 2GHz. I do like Window Maker. It's a bit different than you probably were expecting, but I think it's a bit truer to what X used to be like before everyone started trying to turn it into Windows.
One litre of diesel fuel contains more joules of energy than one litre of petrol (gasoline). However, in order to burn it fully and so release all that energy, it requires more air. Diesel engines therefore have larger displacements than equivalently-powered petrol engines; a runabout that ordinarily has a 1.2 petrol engine might have a 1.6 or even 1.8 in its diesel counterpart.
Although the extra cubes make it sound as though a diesel engine ought to use more fuel, this is not the case since the fuel-air ratio is adjusted correspondingly. A diesel engine draws only air (not fuel-air mixture) into the cylinder and compresses this. A charge of fuel is injected into the cylinder, where the heat from the compressed air ignites it.
Diesels also used to be more expensive because they need five gears (diesel engines have a more sharply-defined peak in the power/speed graph). But all cars have five gears nowadays; I've even seen six on some performance cars.
Come on, where are the comedians? I was expecting a whole load of "Neuticles ..... they're The Dog's Bollocks!" posts, and didn't see even one.
Neuticles. They're the Dog's Bollocks!
It's obvious just whose bastard son PHP is .....
PHP takes care to keep things consistent, which is important for easing beginners in gently; Perl is not afraid to eschew consistency where it makes sense to do so. For instance, PHP's regex matching and substitution functions, derived from Perl, are incredibly tedious. In Perl, you're likely to be doing a lot of regex matches: the syntax is such that you just drop 'em in, and let the parser worry about them. No other language I've encountered lets you do that. Even in Python you have to jump through hoops to do what Perl makes simple, and Java seems to go all out to discourage you from bothering with regular expressions.
Some things about Perl are a bit finicky, especially where they involve getting close to the metal. Take for instance the four-argument select function (the one for seeing which file descriptors are ready to present data, expecting data or have just done something they shouldn't, not the one you use for selecting a filehandle for output.) It expects its arguments to be bitmasks created with pack "i", $bits -- you can't just use, say, integers and have them automagically turned into bitmasks. While that sounds a bit un-Perl-like, you have to remember that there are 8999 integers represented by 4-byte strings (and so indistinguible from 32-bit bitmasks). What you really should do is create a wrapper function around select, which takes its parameters (and returns its results) in a more convenient form for the program you are writing.
I've never understood the point of the liquids ban. The idea of terrorists mixing two or more liquids to create an explosive substance sounds plausible the first time you hear it, but the longer you think about it, the more you realise, it just won't fly.
For one thing, it seems to me that making up an explosive mixture demands rather better facilities than are available in the average aeroplane. I'm no expert {I only got a B in my chemistry A-level in 1999}, but it's hardly likely to be sufficient just to flush the two ingredients down the toilet and hope they mix in the holding tank. Things that look as though they work in films, don't necessarily have to work in real life.
For another thing, the ban doesn't make any sense {unless you are a vendor of overpriced bottled water, in which it makes every sense}. Baby milk is fine; well, what's to stop a would-be terrorist from taking a swig of some liquid disguised as baby milk? If they really believe in their Cause, they'll be able to train themself not to grimace. For that matter, what's to stop a would-be terrorist from swallowing some liquid and puking it up; or injecting some liquid into his bladder and then peeing it out?
Instead let me propose a more radical solution. Establish a secular state {this, of course, will mean that the Church that was founded on the principle of easy access to divorce, will have one final divorce to attend to}. Withdraw all state support to religious organisations of any flavour overseas and remove charitable status from any religious group in Britain. Refuse to recognise the sovereignty of theocracies.
It sounds harsh; but at the end of the day, the "nice" and "nasty" sides of religion are utterly inseparable, and the loss of one is an acceptable price to be free of the other. Besides which, there are thousands of gods that the so-called "moderate" christians, jews and muslims don't believe in -- what difference will one more make?
You're correct. The necessary "written permission" needn't be the GPL -- it could be a separate agreement altogether. However, nobody but the copyright holder {or, in exceptional circumstances, the courts} has the power to grant such permission, and distributing GPL software without permission is no different to distributing any other copyrighted software without permission. Which is why the permission under the GPL originates from the copyright holder -- and even if you didn't receive a copy of the text of the GPL with the program {which is against the GPL conditions unless you specifically requested that}, in fact even if the copy you received is legally considered infringing, you still have all the permissions granted by the GPL.
He does not hold the copyright in the work in question, he did not comply with the conditions of the GPL, he did not pay for the commercial licence and his acts of distribution go well beyond Fair Dealing. Therefore, however you look at it, he is in violation of copyright.
Get two cheap AVO-knockoffs, one of which must have an AC current range. Measure the voltage across the appliance and the current flowing through it. (Note; you will inevitably be measuring either the current drawn by the voltmeter or the voltage drop due to the ammeter. Neither matters much with modern instruments.) Multiply the current by the voltage to get the power in watts, divide by 1000 to get kW, and multiply this by the time in hours to get Units. (1 Unit == 1 kWh == 3.6MJ). For geek points, interface all this lot to a computer. Since you'll be dealing with mains, your circuit will need to be optically isolated. I recommend to build the whole measuring circuit "live", and use an ADC with a synchronous serial output. This way you only need clock and MUX drive (voltage / current selection) in, and data out; you can use just one dual and one single opto-isolator on the printer port. If you don't understand the above, don't try it.
I have also seen standalone plug-in power analysers with a pass-through socket and an LCD showing, in turn as you press a button, the voltage, frequency, current, power, time and energy consumption. They aren't as accurate as a real laboratory instrument, but you get what you pay for.
Now, that's how a real Free Market works -- and it's interesting to see just how much it winds up some of the supposed proponents of Capitalism and the Free Market {what they're really in favour of is oligopoly, cartels and protection from competition by upstarts seeking to enter the market}.
There is no such thing as "a violation of the GPL". What these people have violated is copyright law.
In RMS's ideal world {and mine for that matter}, it would be law that every piece of software had to come with Source Code {this being necessary for the meaningful exercise of Freedoms One and Three}, either at the time it was obtained or anytime later on request; and failure to supply the Source Code on request would be punishable. Source Code isn't the only requirement, but we're simplifying a little here. Anyway, Freedoms Zero and Two can be taken by force if necessary; at the present time, it is orders of magnitude more difficult {though mathematically not impossible} to obtain Source Code by forcible techniques.
The GPL is a sort of "second best" approach, a way to approximate the ideal situation using existing laws.
Existing copyright law already says that if you want to distribute copies of something someone else originally made and which is still under protection of copyright, you usually need permission in writing from that person. The law actually gives you some limited right to make copies in the name of "fair dealing" or "fair use", which nothing can take away -- even if you promise not to exercise your statutory rights, you can go ahead and do so anyway without fear of repercussions. The other person is a sucker for believing in a worthless promise.
Now, if you have written a program and want people to use it, it's clear that you have to make some provision for distributing copies. This is where copyright law comes into play. If, as a fine upstanding citizen, you want to ensure the Four Freedoms for everyone who uses your program, then you can give permission to distribute copies of your program so long as they preserve the Four Freedoms for everyone who receives a copy from them.
The GPL is a letter of permission to do things above and beyond what the Law of the Land allows, on certain conditions. What it basically says is that: you get Freedom Zero whatever happens, and you get Freedom Two if and only if you don't seek to deny any subsequent recipient of the program from you any of the Four Freedoms. If you don't comply with the conditions of the GPL, then it doesn't give you any permission to do anything, and normal copyright law applies.
If you make a derivative work of a GPL program and don't show it to anyone else, then the Law of the land says you can do that: it's Fair Dealing. However, once you overstep the bounds of Fair Dealing, you require written permission. And the GPL only affords permission if you comply with certain conditions. If you do not comply with the conditions of the GPL, then you are in violation of copyright law.
That depends entirely upon whether you consider a transsexual as a lifelong (woman|man) who was born bearing a greater resemblance to a (boy|girl), or a former (man|woman) who was changed into a (woman|man) by surgery. And that's really their own business anyway.
[Rationale for ordering of gender-specific nouns: there are numerically more male-to-female transsexuals than female-to-male, therefore the earlier form is statistically more likely to be correct.]
If it comes up in metamoderation, I promise I'll M2 that "Flamebait" unfair.
Firefox and OpenOffice can trace their lineage directly back to closed-source software (Netscape Navigator and StarOffice respectively). As such, they contain many examples of lousy programming practice, simply because nobody ever thought that code would see the light of day. That's just what you get when you set more store by "on time" than you set by "right". Look at alternative browsers and office applications to see how unbloated they can be made. In defence to the Mozilla people, it is possible to reduce the size of Firefox if you know what you're doing; DSL managed to get a very small executable that they can still call Firefox. OpenOffice really needs doing again from scratch, though.
I would have thought ARM {pre-Thumb} would be about the simplest processor to implement. Basically, at its heart is a matrix of AND-OR selection logic, which allows you to do cool stuff like shifting and crementing on the way in and out. Bits within the opcode determine directly which operation to perform, the source and destination registers, any shifting, pre/post in/decrements, the order of operands {only the physically-second operand can be munged; but for non-commutive operations like subtractions, the logical order is reversible. SBCS R0, R2, R1 can be written as RSCS R0, R1, R2}, the conditionality {every ARM instruction is conditional, though there is an "ALWAYS" condition and even a "NEVER" condition whose use is deprectated} and whether or not to update the condition flags from the current instruction. There's only one branch instruction, which simply stores the return address in a register. You can build an ARM clone out of 74HC TTL ICs {which is what Steve Furber and Sophie [then Roger] Wilson actually did, after proving the instruction set on an emulator based around an expanded BBC Model B}. The logic is obvious from the instruction set, so you certainly won't be violating any trade secrets; and you can change enough details to get around any patent issues without affecting the functionality much {invert the sense of one of the condition code bits?}.
ARM is also inherently low-power, providing plenty of instructions per joule.
Nice Hitler troll, but "Mein Kampf" is not banned. You can buy it and read it. The copyright belongs to the State of Bavaria and is to all intents and purposes unenforcible. The book is due to enter the Public Domain soon, if not already ..... you might find a copy on Project Gutenberg. It's a bit ..... challenging, I think is the word used nowadays. Clearly the work of a smart person, though equally clear that <litotes>he has a bee in his bonnet.</litotes>
I think you'll find that the phone's main processor is controlling the switched-mode power supply for battery charging. Instead of a comparator, a few resistors and a hefty transistor, they use an ADC and some spare CPU cycles to operate said hefty transistor. The idea is that as soon as there's enough voltage just to power the processor at all, it can deal with the whole business of interrupting and restarting the charging current to the supply capacitor {which is how a conventional SMPS regulates its voltage}. I first observed something like this about 7 years ago in a piece of vehicle electronics, containing a microprocessor. It used some kind of charge pump {i.e. where capacitors are alternately charged in parallel then discharged in series} to generate a higher supply voltage than the battery, to feed an op-amp amplifying the voltage drop across a resistance of a few milliohms to monitor current {no op-amp can amplify signals which are hard up against either supply rail, so you always need a supply just out of range. Easy to obtain in a mains appliance, harder in a battery appliance}. The transistors, diodes and capacitors were obvious, but damned if I could find the oscillator that ran it. Turned out it was a pin on the processor .....
My mobile is a Sony Ericsson, bought before Sony did that scandalous rootkit thing {but then I'm immune to that anyway, not having any Windows PCs}.
Well, seeing as I have a mortgage, there's precious little point me having any savings. They would never, ever earn as much interest as I'm paying out on my mortgage -- it's how the whole banking system works. If I had any spare money, it would go straight into paying off the mortgage sooner. If I want to buy something online, I write a cheque or buy a postal order. This gives me some additional time to think carefully about the purchase. Do I really need it, or will I merely be contributing to the waste disposal time bomb? Might it be a better idea to swallow the cost of patronising a local retailer?
About your sig: I have two filament bulbs in my house. One is in the understairs cupboard, controlled by a microswitch which keeps it OFF when the door is closed. The other is in a bedside lamp controlled by a dimmer switch, and is about eight years old: the dimmer switch is a "turn off" one rather than a "push off" one, so it gets a gentle start. All the rest are energy-saving compact fluorescents. My central heating has a combi boiler {no hot water tank} with electronic ignition {no wasteful pilot burner} and TRVs all around. I don't think there's a lot of energy left I can save! I wholeheartedly endorse your campaign. However, I have recently noticed a lot of cheap imported table lamps with 14mm screw fittings, instead of the usual 22mm push-and-twist fitting. It would be nice to see either some cheap energy saver bulbs with 14mm screw threads, or a ban on lamps which are incompatible with energy saver bulbs. Also, the web site needs to be made more obviously British {try replacing the "dollar sign" stylised bulb filaments with pound signs for a start}.
On-line banking isn't worth it. I know exactly how much money goes into my bank account each month, because I know how much I get paid each month, and how much I might have paid in through the hole-in-the-wall machine. No money gets into my account any other way except a negligible amount of interest. I know exactly how much money comes out of my bank each month, because I stand right there at the HITW and transfer it to my wallet every time I make a withdrawal, I know what cheques I have signed, and no money comes out any other way. If I was really bothered, I could subtract the second subtotal from the first and keep a running total; but as long as it's always smaller, that's all that matters to me. My bank send me a statement as soon as I have performed enough transactions to fill a page, and the HITW has a button to check my balance if I am desperate to know while out and about. I don't really need to know exactly how much money is in the bank until I am ready to draw some out; and then I will have to go to the HITW anyway to do that, so I might as well check my balance right then. On-line banking can't print pound notes, nor can it scan cheques and pay them into my account. And since deposits and withdrawals are the only two reasons why I would ever have to go to a bank anyway, what's the point?