Why not coat the plastic with a glow in the dark dye? Most things I have seen continue to glow respectibly well unless they are in the dark for a long time. Just leave the thing on your desk and let it recharge for a few hours.
I represent a group of pencils and stickynotes that holds the copyright on the term "copyrithg" in any electronic forum. You now owe us a medium sized plate of nachos. This letter does not remove our remedy to ask you for nachos in the future.
The problem with this is that it places an unnecessary burden on the employer to police and spy on its employees. Come on now. If I write a threatening letter and drop it in my company's outbound mail box is it really the company's fault? Why then should the telephone or email be any different? If I have an illegal website running from my apartment, should my landlady be responsible for that as well? What ever happened to personal responsibility and the idea that we are presumed innocent until proven guilty?
There's still something to be said for hand made models and costumes when it comes to realism.
I agree. Sometimes its fun to watch these movies and try to pick out what things were actually made from. When the citizens are abandoning cloud city, one of them is carrying an ice cream maker. There's something about using real things like this that make the surroundings look real and familliar, even when they are populated by strange beings and high-tech droids.
As long as paper versions are still available, you can buy one and sell it to the next student (assuming the same text is used the next year). Publishers have to sell these things, and if there is really poor demand for the electronic version, they will discontinue it.
I doubt that they would completely switch a title over to electronic form, even for computer texts. It seems more likely that an electronic version would be offered alongside the paper version on a few titles to gauge demand.
This, and DVD, and many other things are really dissappointing. DVD had the potential to make compact playable movies, but the media and players were unnecessarily complicated to add DSS. Real books are great, but online books could have suplimented them:
1) Oh, I forgot my book in my friend's dorm room and he went hiking and I really need to study for that exam. No problem if you also had an electronic version
2) I remember something about measuring cache performance on SMP machines, but it's not in the index. No problem if you could do a full text search.
"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" is no longer the rule of the day. Why trap the mouse when you can make him pay licensing fees to inhabit the walls of the house.
Or consider that in Europe, people pay a tax on blank tapes, money that is then shipped directly to the music industry.
The presumption is that you use tapes for illegal copying, so you might as well pay the "legitimate artists" for that.
Do they ask you at the checkout line which artists you are planning on copying? It's only fair that those who get copied get the money:). I know that in the UK, taxes are charged for radios, TVs and I think home computers, but this at least is done by the government to support worthwile things like the BBC.
Most likely Oracle and Sybase. These are the big two that I would assume. It is possible that MS SQL server was used, but it is basically Sybase. It is also possible that Ingres was used, but again not as likely as Sybase and Oracle.
And for an advanced project, try to implement an algorithm for playing these games. Students will learn what the odds are and may be enticed _not_ to do real gambling. Sounds like an admirible goal.
Um, no. Although parenting may have changed some, the bigger change has been the world in which we parent. Before the Internet, there was no possible way for my 3 year old daughter to ever see pr0n, period, unless some sicko assaulted her in some way.
Among those in my generation, I was the oddball for not only having a computer, but programming it at age 8. I would even work on programs on paper when I was in class.
But 3???? Most 3 year olds I know don't even know how to read much less use a computer. Hasn't anyone ever thought that maybe children this young shouldn't be using computers? As our world becomes more and more computerized, I feel that the social interaction skills that children develop in early grades will become even more important. Let Suzy wait another two years to learn how to use a mouse and keyboard, but teach her a love of reading and the ability to get along with her peers as soon as you can.
This is just plain stupid. This is almost as bad as when "Life is Beautiful" was re-released with English dubbing. As long as the subtitles are legible and well timed, what is the problem??? Are people in the US too lazy to do a bit of reading when they go to the movies?? For well subtitled movies, I often almost completely forget that I am reading the dialog.
I think that Disney and a few other groups automatically assume cartoon==for kids, and since younger kids can't read, the film should be dubbed. But "Princess Mononoke" and "Life is Beautiful" are not for children and definately not for children to young to read.
I wanted to reply to this yesterday, but we or slashdot or both were offline.
Anyway, the number of bytes doesn't really matter, compression comes from the ability to create a statistical model which predicts probabilities that differ from a uniform distribution. Take a fair coin (one that comes up heads 50% of the time and tails 50%) and try to compress the sequence of H's and T's that it produces. If you look at the sequence, there may be runs of H's or T's, but these runs are entirely expected from a uniform distribution. A run of 1 or more happens every time, a run of two or more requires that the second coin match the first, and so happens 50% of the time. A run of three or more happens 25% of the time, and so on. Since these runs are predicted by a uniform distribution, they don't represent any redundancy that can be exploited to compress the data.
If, on the other hand, your coin only came up heads one time in 10, then you could compress the data because the sequence of H's and T's wouldn't be predicted by a uniform distibution.
Random garbage would compress very well actually. Probably about 50%.
BZZZT Sorry, if the garbage were pure and statistally random it should not compress at all. On the contrary, it may even grow. This is a consequence of information theory, but there is a fairly intuitive reason behind it.
First, there is a maximum compression you will be able to get for a group of bits. Otherwise, everything would eventually compress to one bit, and how could we possibly uncompress one bit into more than two distinct things?
Second, compression just substitutes one set of bits for another. If every set of bits of length N could be reduced to a unique set of bits with length < N, then 2^N items were just mapped to at best 2^(N-1)+2^(N-2)+...=(2^N)-1. Best case, at least two items just got mapped to the same item. Therefore, if a loseless compression scheme is to be reversible, there must be cases where the output will be larger than the input.
Perhaps they could replace it with three monkeys. Instead of "see no evil" "hear no evil" and "speak no evil", they could have one monkey for "read the file" one for "write the file" and another for "execute the file".
Then again, simple RWX letters along the side might be sufficient for advanced users.
Where in my post did you conclude that I have a problem with guns? You seem to be going off half-cocked (bad pun I know). I was pointint out how stupid it would be to try and make guns illegal.
Well then, ban firearms. IMHO it's a step that America should take since we are the country with the highest murder rate in the Western world, which is related to our Constitional "rights" to own guns and kill people.
Moderators are asleep at the switch. This should be marked as funny. I am not a member of the NRA, but "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns". If someone is planning to commit a crime (hold up a bank, rob a store, murder someone), are they really going to say "Well, gun's are illegal, and I could get in more trouble, so I'll go hold up this liquor store with a sock filled with pennies" Give me a break! Any additional sentance for posessing the guns would be incidental to that for assult, armed robbery, etc. Look how well outlawing drugs has reduced access to them!!!
Why should Assembly code, machine code, C code, or LISP be any different in the eyes of the law? If you wrote it, it is speech. It doesn't matter at what level of abstraction you wrote it. IANAL, but I don't think the courts want to get into a game of "assembly is not protected", "C is protected". What would we do with asm("noop"); ? Is it C, is it assembly? If the courts were to make such a distinction, they would be effectively saying one type of language is in some sense "better" than the other. If programmers who write code for a living can't agree on which language is better than another, then the courts certainly can't.
I just thought of this. If the reverse engineering is to provide compatibility between two pieces of software, then it is legal, right?
Well, encrypted data on DVD, or books such as this one can't be said to be human readable text, can they? They are instructions to be interpreted by the computer in ordrer to produce the human readable video, or text.
"Instructions to be interpreted by the computer", repeat that a few times, and if you know anything about computers you'll jump to your feet and say "It's software!!".
IANAL, but as I see it:
encrypted material cannot be viewed as a human readable format
in order to to view the content, it must be interpreted by a computer
this makes the content of an encrypted book or DVD more like instructions for the computer to create a video stream, book, song, etc. rather than a video stream, book or song itself.
instructions to be carried out by a computer are software, which should have reverse engineering protection.
Seems like you could average multiple recordings and converge on the true song. I think this would handle noise to an arbitrary degree (more recordings averaged == less noise). I'm not sure about multipath though. Nasty stuff, multipath.
Right, there is no material that you could use to build such a rod. Also, imagine that you were on the moon and were tracing a line from New York to Los Angeles with a laser pointer. If you swept this beam back and forth fast enough, the spot could move over the Earth's surface at greater than the speed of light. BUT.
Neither people in LA, nor New York could affect the path of that beam as it is controlled from the moon, so they can't send any data.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not coat the plastic with a glow in the dark dye? Most things I have seen continue to glow respectibly well unless they are in the dark for a long time. Just leave the thing on your desk and let it recharge for a few hours.
I represent a group of pencils and stickynotes that holds the copyright on the term "copyrithg" in any electronic forum. You now owe us a medium sized plate of nachos. This letter does not remove our remedy to ask you for nachos in the future.
The problem with this is that it places an unnecessary burden on the employer to police and spy on its employees. Come on now. If I write a threatening letter and drop it in my company's outbound mail box is it really the company's fault? Why then should the telephone or email be any different? If I have an illegal website running from my apartment, should my landlady be responsible for that as well? What ever happened to personal responsibility and the idea that we are presumed innocent until proven guilty?
There's still something to be said for hand made models and costumes when it comes to realism.
I agree. Sometimes its fun to watch these movies and try to pick out what things were actually made from. When the citizens are abandoning cloud city, one of them is carrying an ice cream maker. There's something about using real things like this that make the surroundings look real and familliar, even when they are populated by strange beings and high-tech droids.
As long as paper versions are still available, you can buy one and sell it to the next student (assuming the same text is used the next year). Publishers have to sell these things, and if there is really poor demand for the electronic version, they will discontinue it. I doubt that they would completely switch a title over to electronic form, even for computer texts. It seems more likely that an electronic version would be offered alongside the paper version on a few titles to gauge demand. This, and DVD, and many other things are really dissappointing. DVD had the potential to make compact playable movies, but the media and players were unnecessarily complicated to add DSS. Real books are great, but online books could have suplimented them: 1) Oh, I forgot my book in my friend's dorm room and he went hiking and I really need to study for that exam. No problem if you also had an electronic version 2) I remember something about measuring cache performance on SMP machines, but it's not in the index. No problem if you could do a full text search. "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" is no longer the rule of the day. Why trap the mouse when you can make him pay licensing fees to inhabit the walls of the house.
Or consider that in Europe, people pay a tax on blank tapes, money that is then shipped directly to the music industry. The presumption is that you use tapes for illegal copying, so you might as well pay the "legitimate artists" for that.
Do they ask you at the checkout line which artists you are planning on copying? It's only fair that those who get copied get the money :). I know that in the UK, taxes are charged for radios, TVs and I think home computers, but this at least is done by the government to support worthwile things like the BBC.
Most likely Oracle and Sybase. These are the big two that I would assume. It is possible that MS SQL server was used, but it is basically Sybase. It is also possible that Ingres was used, but again not as likely as Sybase and Oracle.
And for an advanced project, try to implement an algorithm for playing these games. Students will learn what the odds are and may be enticed _not_ to do real gambling. Sounds like an admirible goal.
Um, no. Although parenting may have changed some, the bigger change has been the world in which we parent. Before the Internet, there was no possible way for my 3 year old daughter to ever see pr0n, period, unless some sicko assaulted her in some way.
Among those in my generation, I was the oddball for not only having a computer, but programming it at age 8. I would even work on programs on paper when I was in class.
But 3???? Most 3 year olds I know don't even know how to read much less use a computer. Hasn't anyone ever thought that maybe children this young shouldn't be using computers? As our world becomes more and more computerized, I feel that the social interaction skills that children develop in early grades will become even more important. Let Suzy wait another two years to learn how to use a mouse and keyboard, but teach her a love of reading and the ability to get along with her peers as soon as you can.
User: Post this story
Computer: Unable to toast lorry
User: No, Post, P
Computer: Command 'host tea'. Tea is scheduled for 16:00
User: Post the damn story
Computer: Command 'roast ham'. Oven is preheating. Would you like to serve the Ham with tea?
User: Cancel, I do not want ham, I do not want spam, I do not like it in a car, I do not like it at the bar. Just post the story.
...
This is just plain stupid. This is almost as bad as when "Life is Beautiful" was re-released with English dubbing. As long as the subtitles are legible and well timed, what is the problem??? Are people in the US too lazy to do a bit of reading when they go to the movies?? For well subtitled movies, I often almost completely forget that I am reading the dialog.
I think that Disney and a few other groups automatically assume cartoon==for kids, and since younger kids can't read, the film should be dubbed. But "Princess Mononoke" and "Life is Beautiful" are not for children and definately not for children to young to read.
Rant over and out.
I wanted to reply to this yesterday, but we or slashdot or both were offline.
Anyway, the number of bytes doesn't really matter, compression comes from the ability to create a statistical model which predicts probabilities that differ from a uniform distribution. Take a fair coin (one that comes up heads 50% of the time and tails 50%) and try to compress the sequence of H's and T's that it produces. If you look at the sequence, there may be runs of H's or T's, but these runs are entirely expected from a uniform distribution. A run of 1 or more happens every time, a run of two or more requires that the second coin match the first, and so happens 50% of the time. A run of three or more happens 25% of the time, and so on. Since these runs are predicted by a uniform distribution, they don't represent any redundancy that can be exploited to compress the data.
If, on the other hand, your coin only came up heads one time in 10, then you could compress the data because the sequence of H's and T's wouldn't be predicted by a uniform distibution.
Random garbage would compress very well actually. Probably about 50%.
BZZZT Sorry, if the garbage were pure and statistally random it should not compress at all. On the contrary, it may even grow. This is a consequence of information theory, but there is a fairly intuitive reason behind it.
First, there is a maximum compression you will be able to get for a group of bits. Otherwise, everything would eventually compress to one bit, and how could we possibly uncompress one bit into more than two distinct things?
Second, compression just substitutes one set of bits for another. If every set of bits of length N could be reduced to a unique set of bits with length < N, then 2^N items were just mapped to at best 2^(N-1)+2^(N-2)+...=(2^N)-1. Best case, at least two items just got mapped to the same item. Therefore, if a loseless compression scheme is to be reversible, there must be cases where the output will be larger than the input.
Maybe Andover could make some extra $$ by offering to host a mirror of a soon-to-be slashdotted website. Sort of like slashdot effect insurance.
Could also be that they are doing the same as they would for a movie released first on video. Although, I can't think of when this last happened.
Perhaps they could replace it with three monkeys. Instead of "see no evil" "hear no evil" and "speak no evil", they could have one monkey for "read the file" one for "write the file" and another for "execute the file".
Then again, simple RWX letters along the side might be sufficient for advanced users.
Where in my post did you conclude that I have a problem with guns? You seem to be going off half-cocked (bad pun I know). I was pointint out how stupid it would be to try and make guns illegal.
Moderators are asleep at the switch. This should be marked as funny. I am not a member of the NRA, but "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns". If someone is planning to commit a crime (hold up a bank, rob a store, murder someone), are they really going to say "Well, gun's are illegal, and I could get in more trouble, so I'll go hold up this liquor store with a sock filled with pennies" Give me a break! Any additional sentance for posessing the guns would be incidental to that for assult, armed robbery, etc. Look how well outlawing drugs has reduced access to them!!!
Why should Assembly code, machine code, C code, or LISP be any different in the eyes of the law? If you wrote it, it is speech. It doesn't matter at what level of abstraction you wrote it. IANAL, but I don't think the courts want to get into a game of "assembly is not protected", "C is protected". What would we do with asm("noop"); ? Is it C, is it assembly? If the courts were to make such a distinction, they would be effectively saying one type of language is in some sense "better" than the other. If programmers who write code for a living can't agree on which language is better than another, then the courts certainly can't.
I just thought of this. If the reverse engineering is to provide compatibility between two pieces of software, then it is legal, right?
Well, encrypted data on DVD, or books such as this one can't be said to be human readable text, can they? They are instructions to be interpreted by the computer in ordrer to produce the human readable video, or text.
"Instructions to be interpreted by the computer", repeat that a few times, and if you know anything about computers you'll jump to your feet and say "It's software!!".
IANAL, but as I see it:encrypted material cannot be viewed as a human readable format
in order to to view the content, it must be interpreted by a computer
this makes the content of an encrypted book or DVD more like instructions for the computer to create a video stream, book, song, etc. rather than a video stream, book or song itself.
instructions to be carried out by a computer are software, which should have reverse engineering protection.
Seems like you could average multiple recordings and converge on the true song. I think this would handle noise to an arbitrary degree (more recordings averaged == less noise). I'm not sure about multipath though. Nasty stuff, multipath.
Right, there is no material that you could use to build such a rod. Also, imagine that you were on the moon and were tracing a line from New York to Los Angeles with a laser pointer. If you swept this beam back and forth fast enough, the spot could move over the Earth's surface at greater than the speed of light. BUT.
Neither people in LA, nor New York could affect the path of that beam as it is controlled from the moon, so they can't send any data.
I think you're right. Perhaps this was used to transmit the story backwards in time from April 1. The ultimate April fool's joke. :)
This wasn't by any chance filed by the LinuxOne people, was it?
On crunchy toast or crepe with sliced bananas. That's good eatin'
Is it just me, or do most free software projects have much cooler names than commercial products?