I don't know about that, I could see CNN or Fox news running little taglines..."Corporation sues 12 yr old and her single mother, details at 11" might keep a few people on the channel to watch their commercials. That's how news channels make their money.
If there were any real journalists left this would make an excellent introduction into abuses by large corporations...I hope 60 minutes picks this up, that's one of the few shows left that seem to have any integrity.
Seems to me that one could argue both sides. The word transformed seems broad enough to cause some problems, but calling the hashes derivative would seem to violate the spirit of the law.
I dunno about that...I've never run into a game my 650 MHz Athlon with a GeForce can't run. I thought I might have problems with Vice City, since I dropped down to the minimum spec, but it runs perfectly fine even with the resolution and view distance turned up a bit.
Recommended usually just means what would make the game run the best, and obviously they are going to put the newest hardware there, but it doesn't mean you can't run the game perfectly well with an older computer.
Well, it's not like they are going to implement the patents and they are only delaying the start date. They are delaying a vote, so it's still undecided.
To me it sounds like some of the people who might have voted yes on this issue may have realized how stupid they were being, and hopefully will re-examine the facts and have a change of hart.
Remember, politicians by and large won't understand the issue themselves, it's way out of their field, and it needs to be explained. For many years lobbiests for major corporations have been explaining the yes side, now some economists are explaining the no side and people are realizing the major problems with software patents.
Not that I want to defend Microsoft, but it's impossible to write a large software project without a few bugs. Yes, Microsoft could do a much better job with their software, but perfection is impossible.
Also, while I sympathize with the sentiment, I feel the logic you use is flawed. For example, a pedistrian gets hit by a drunk driver. If the pedistrian wasn't there he wouldn't have been hit, but it's still the drunk driver's fault.
Try using any of the apps that come out of Apple and say that. They are all simple and to the point. All preferences are always in the same spot through the entire OS, with a standard interface. The thing I've found about Macs are it's either blatently obvious how to do something, or it's essentially impossible since Apple hasn't gotten around to it yet (the point here is design, not completeness of implementation).
In Canada (note there is only 1 d) and the rest of the commonwealth you cannot call yourself an engineer unless you have a degree from an accredited institution.
Universities are accredited by the local engineering society, courses are audited, exam results are reviewed, it's taken very seriously.
I wish the rest of the US would get on board with regulating the term engineer. After all the crap I had to go through I don't like being grouped in with technicians whose job I could do straight out of highschool.
To me the interesting thing is the doping. Are there actually diamond transistors on the market now, or is this still a theoretical thing? As far as I knew it was just gallium arsenide and silicon that were being doped.
An engineer is someone who designs software and systems for unix.
I don't want to be pedantic, but that's not what an engineer
is. In most countries it is illegal to call yourself an engineer if you aren't. Unfortunantly the united states is not one of those countries.
I don't feel pity for the pirates, I feel pity for all the servers that will be DDOSed because of this.
If microsoft could, I wouldn't mind them locking down the pirated installs, shutting them down, erasing the hard drive, whatever. Leaving them functioning and unpatched is what I think is irresponsible.
That's actually a really good point, since microsoft won't let you autoupdate with pirated versions of the OS I bet a large percentage of home users are not going to be patched.
I think it's pretty irresponsible of them not to allow the autoupdate really...the problem is they've created a monopoly in the home OS market, so people will pirate it, and they have a seriously flawed product, so there's no way around having a large number of flaws floating around in the uninformed general public.
Disclaimer: I do not have a pirated copy of XP. I have a licenced version because my university made a deal with microsoft and it was free, but I use my powerbook for anything serious. Even with the autoupdate patching my system every week I still don't trust that box for anything more important than games.
I've never seen anyone ask for Fast and Good myself, but I would assume my answer would be to spend shitloads of money for commercial products/licencing, and hire the best contractors you can find.
If the government mandated that all voting software must be open source then what would their competition do?
Any competition they have would need to be open source as well to comply with this rule, and what's more, it's a lot easier to detect someone stealing your code if both systems are open source.
Even better, if you are first to market with an open source propritary solution (i.e. no one is allowed to steal code, ever, but they can look at it all they want) you get the benifit of all the free audits. Like the one done by that university on the leaked code a while back. You can make improvements based on suggestions from the public, and you get generally better systems.
The US is the source of the Patriot Act, RIAA, SCO, and is generally a bully in forign affairs.
Every article I read on slashdot makes the idea of taking up arms against the US more and more appealing.
Sure, SCO will get the money from the lawsuit itself, but nothing beyond that.
Well, they're trying to charge $699 per processor, maybe somone will bite.
[long rant]
What really blows my mind is that if SCO won everything, and suddenly Linux and BSD were liable for copyright infringement, otherwise free software would now cost $1399 dollars per processor, or whatever arbitrarily high number they dream up, all for the use of RCU and whatever else IBM invented and put in AIX.
Now, what would happen then? Certainly they wouldn't be able to charge that much for other people's work on an ongoing basis, simply because they couldn't distribute a copyright infringing linux for $1399 without violating the GPL. In the end, even if everything goes their way, they end up with a bunch of cash but no possibilities for income. Charging that much for Linux seems to be a misappropriation of countless man-hours of work on the part of the free software community.
I suppose the real worst case would be SCO wins and the GPL is declared invalid...and frankly that's they only way I see any long term viability for SCO. I have to admit, it would be entertaining seeing geeks rioting in the streets all across the world...I can think some people in linux user groups who probably would.
It's strange that with the political clout I'm sure IBM has, that they couldn't have arranged to rush this thing to court, or that the government hasn't pressed charges what sounds more and more every day like extortion and blackmail....heh, maybe the longer they wait the more stupid things SCO will say, better case against them.
[/long rant]
I downloaded the app for OSX to give it a test run. I think I'll stick with Mail.app for email, since the I've got the junk filter all trained up and it gets my hotmail, but I'm very happy Thunderbird is a decent news group client.
A few months ago I went on a search to find a free news client with a decent UI. While Thunderbird is a little clunky (some bugs in the UI, graphics missing on tabs) it's already much better than anything else out there I managed to find. Now I won't have to use a cgi script to read news groups anymore!
Why is it if someone else in this thread posts a similar joke, it'll be modded redundant, and yet every time there is a spam story one of these jokes gets modded +5 funny?
I thought the whole point of this algorithm was that if you give it enough data, eventually it would see that phrase and remember it, giving a perfect translation.
The only problem with ignoring grammer and syntax and just getting massive amounts of data would likely be storage space and training/translation time.
I worked for a telephone company for a while, and I find this to be quite plausible. They had no idea who was connected to their networks, and often they would go though the connections and unplug the ones that weren't accounted for just to see if anyone complained, that way they could find out if the connection was supposed to be there.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about that, I could see CNN or Fox news running little taglines..."Corporation sues 12 yr old and her single mother, details at 11" might keep a few people on the channel to watch their commercials. That's how news channels make their money.
If there were any real journalists left this would make an excellent introduction into abuses by large corporations...I hope 60 minutes picks this up, that's one of the few shows left that seem to have any integrity.
A derivative work is work that has been "recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represents an original work of authorship, is a 'derivative work.'"
Seems to me that one could argue both sides. The word transformed seems broad enough to cause some problems, but calling the hashes derivative would seem to violate the spirit of the law.
Oh, shit, forgot to check the AC box...and yes, it's grammar, not grammer. ugh.
Posting this AC cuz it's totally off-topic, but when you mean "you are" it's "you're" not "your".
I dunno about that...I've never run into a game my 650 MHz Athlon with a GeForce can't run. I thought I might have problems with Vice City, since I dropped down to the minimum spec, but it runs perfectly fine even with the resolution and view distance turned up a bit.
Recommended usually just means what would make the game run the best, and obviously they are going to put the newest hardware there, but it doesn't mean you can't run the game perfectly well with an older computer.
Well, it's not like they are going to implement the patents and they are only delaying the start date. They are delaying a vote, so it's still undecided.
To me it sounds like some of the people who might have voted yes on this issue may have realized how stupid they were being, and hopefully will re-examine the facts and have a change of hart.
Remember, politicians by and large won't understand the issue themselves, it's way out of their field, and it needs to be explained. For many years lobbiests for major corporations have been explaining the yes side, now some economists are explaining the no side and people are realizing the major problems with software patents.
Not that I want to defend Microsoft, but it's impossible to write a large software project without a few bugs. Yes, Microsoft could do a much better job with their software, but perfection is impossible.
Also, while I sympathize with the sentiment, I feel the logic you use is flawed. For example, a pedistrian gets hit by a drunk driver. If the pedistrian wasn't there he wouldn't have been hit, but it's still the drunk driver's fault.
Try using any of the apps that come out of Apple and say that. They are all simple and to the point. All preferences are always in the same spot through the entire OS, with a standard interface. The thing I've found about Macs are it's either blatently obvious how to do something, or it's essentially impossible since Apple hasn't gotten around to it yet (the point here is design, not completeness of implementation).
In Canada (note there is only 1 d) and the rest of the commonwealth you cannot call yourself an engineer unless you have a degree from an accredited institution.
Universities are accredited by the local engineering society, courses are audited, exam results are reviewed, it's taken very seriously.
I wish the rest of the US would get on board with regulating the term engineer. After all the crap I had to go through I don't like being grouped in with technicians whose job I could do straight out of highschool.
To me the interesting thing is the doping. Are there actually diamond transistors on the market now, or is this still a theoretical thing? As far as I knew it was just gallium arsenide and silicon that were being doped.
I don't feel pity for the pirates, I feel pity for all the servers that will be DDOSed because of this.
If microsoft could, I wouldn't mind them locking down the pirated installs, shutting them down, erasing the hard drive, whatever. Leaving them functioning and unpatched is what I think is irresponsible.
I think it's pretty irresponsible of them not to allow the autoupdate really...the problem is they've created a monopoly in the home OS market, so people will pirate it, and they have a seriously flawed product, so there's no way around having a large number of flaws floating around in the uninformed general public.
Disclaimer: I do not have a pirated copy of XP. I have a licenced version because my university made a deal with microsoft and it was free, but I use my powerbook for anything serious. Even with the autoupdate patching my system every week I still don't trust that box for anything more important than games.
It's kind of odd this got modded interesting when the pictures are of chocolate mice. I suspect the moderators didn't bother to follow the links.
Dude...it's Friday. And yes, it's sad that Friday night would be a big night for slashdot...
I've never seen anyone ask for Fast and Good myself, but I would assume my answer would be to spend shitloads of money for commercial products/licencing, and hire the best contractors you can find.
I couldn't disagree more.
If the government mandated that all voting software must be open source then what would their competition do?
Any competition they have would need to be open source as well to comply with this rule, and what's more, it's a lot easier to detect someone stealing your code if both systems are open source.
Even better, if you are first to market with an open source propritary solution (i.e. no one is allowed to steal code, ever, but they can look at it all they want) you get the benifit of all the free audits. Like the one done by that university on the leaked code a while back. You can make improvements based on suggestions from the public, and you get generally better systems.
The US is the source of the Patriot Act, RIAA, SCO, and is generally a bully in forign affairs. Every article I read on slashdot makes the idea of taking up arms against the US more and more appealing.
I think I'm joking...but honestly...i'm not sure.
If only all software were written that way, jobs for everyone!
Perhaps it weighs more now that it's an organism and not a product, we have to count all those hefty developers.
Perhaps it weighs less, because now it's not a product so you can't count the weight of the CDs.
Perhaps it weighs next to nothing, as it is just a collection of electrons.
Perhaps this whole article, and especially this post, are just plain silly.
I downloaded the app for OSX to give it a test run. I think I'll stick with Mail.app for email, since the I've got the junk filter all trained up and it gets my hotmail, but I'm very happy Thunderbird is a decent news group client.
A few months ago I went on a search to find a free news client with a decent UI. While Thunderbird is a little clunky (some bugs in the UI, graphics missing on tabs) it's already much better than anything else out there I managed to find. Now I won't have to use a cgi script to read news groups anymore!
Why is it if someone else in this thread posts a similar joke, it'll be modded redundant, and yet every time there is a spam story one of these jokes gets modded +5 funny?
ugh.
I thought the whole point of this algorithm was that if you give it enough data, eventually it would see that phrase and remember it, giving a perfect translation.
The only problem with ignoring grammer and syntax and just getting massive amounts of data would likely be storage space and training/translation time.
I worked for a telephone company for a while, and I find this to be quite plausible. They had no idea who was connected to their networks, and often they would go though the connections and unplug the ones that weren't accounted for just to see if anyone complained, that way they could find out if the connection was supposed to be there.