Has there ever been a court verdict saying that the fourth amendment isn't valid here?
I believe so, under the grounds that you are voluntarily submitting to the search (by choosing to fly). You have the option of not flying, which wouldn't cause your stuff to be searched, so it's not a violation of the security of your effects.
It's like if a police officer came to your door and asked you to come inside. If you say that it's okay, and then they see something illegal inside your place, that's admissible in court, because you let them in voluntarily.
It's definitely the kind of thing that's borderline, since you do have travel options other than flying, but none of the other options are really equivalent in any way. I'm not entirely sure where I stand on the issue. I think the behind-the-scenes stupidity is ridiculous, of course, but I'm undecided about whether or not bag searches as a requirement to getting on a plane are ultimately a good or bad idea.
Of course Canadian and UK law is probaly different from the land of litigation. I get the feeling in top corporate companies in the US, they will only go so far to tell other employers only the fact that the employee in question worked at that company and if they left on good terms due to fear of intentionally being accused of being malicious Growing up, my friend's mom used to have to answer employee referrals for a big corporation, and she said that there was a code where if you liked someone, you said very good things about them, and if you thought someone was crap, you only confirmed that they were employed for the dates stated. Anyone getting a "I can only confirm that Mr. Soandso was employed here." was supposed to know that that meant "We recommend that you not hire this person."
That's pretty much what I thought. It's sort of like saying that if you change sh to be setuid (or, to be equivalent, copy sh to login) you can get root access on a Unix system.
This wouldn't bug me, as long as the application was accompanied by a fully operational example:) Actually, the Patent Office does require a fully operational model when it comes to perpetual motion machines. They're specifically called out in the rules:)
Most of the perpetual motion machines that actually get a patent are because it's not submitted as "perpetual motion machine", it's some crazy complicated device that turns out to be a perpetual motion machine at its core, but that particular claim is buried among several hundred, or whatever.
While I'm pretty sure Google wouldn't be so ignorant as to violate open source licenses for the code they utilize, is there any claim to his "pirate" label, or is he just trying to be inflamitory? I think what he's saying is that he thinks Google violates the spirit of licenses (particularly the GPL), even though they follow all the requirements of them. Some people get upset that the Internet makes it so that you can separate the using of software from the running of it (whereas in non-networked environments, those are equivalent), and all the obligations in the licenses are stated in terms of people who run the software, so companies like Google can modify software to their heart's content and never have to release their modifications, because they're not letting anyone else run the software.
Personally, I can't imagine that Stallman and others were ignorant of the idea of accessing software over a network, and they didn't make any effort to change the rules in GPL v3 to eliminate that use case, so I think he's somewhat on his own in that respect.
...the not-so-big names signed up was to swing around their corp-peens I guess:P
There are actually almost 1100 distinct licenses up for auction, and the vast majority of them are for regional licenses that will go for maybe a couple million dollars. That's what all the smaller companies are signing up for.
Maybe that will eventually make it a "green" city.
Actually, in terms of average energy cost per resident, New York City is already one of the greenest cities in the US. Less than half of households own cars, 1 in 3 mass transit trips in the US is made on the NYC subway, and dense apartment buildings mean your excess heat and cooling leaks into your neighbor's residence instead of the air. If you were to take New York City's residents and change the population density to that of Suffolk County (the eastern county on Long Island), you would need an area the size of Maryland to house them.
In terms of environmental impact per square mile, New York City is certainly terrible, but in terms of environment impact per person (which is generally a better metric), New York City does fabulously.
The issue is that the "future version" clause means that you can use the code under one version OR another, not that the newer versions supersede the old. In other words, if GPLv2 says doing X is okay but Y is not, and GPLv3 says X is bad, but Y is good, then you can use code licensed in that manner by doing X or Y (or both, or neither).
Almost right. In legal English, "or" means exclusive or. So, when it says "or any future version" it means you get to pick a single version. Thus, if GPLv2 allows X and prohibits Y and version 3 allows Y and prohibits X, you can do only X, only Y, or neither, but you can't do both, because that would require somehow mixing the two licenses. You get to pick which license terms you want to adhere to, but you don't get to mix and match provisions of both.
Many of the numbers iSuppli comes up with are pretty much made up. Regardless, most news organizations assume that the entire difference between retail of the device and the iSuppli number is "pure profit," etc. - this is utter nonsense. Previous iSuppli numbers have been shot down by reason, I hope to see the same thing in this instance.
In this case, the author at Daring Fireball is aiming at the wrong target. iSuppli doesn't claim their numbers are anything other than what they are: the cost for the materials used in the product. They never claim that all the remaining portion is profit, if you read the actual press release, that's an interpretation provided by the media. iSuppli isn't screwing up here, it's just that reporters don't understand what they're reading.
To me, it's a terrible waste of money and technology. My parents would have gone mad if I had ever deliberately broken something as expensive as that.
Rich kids with too much free money to spend...
You do realize this is an advertisement, right? He's spending $500 on an iPhone, plus production costs, in order to sell what's likely to be thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of dollars in blenders. Not exactly a waste.
If you go through the apple demo of how to activate your iPhone, it says the time will vary "depending on your provider".
On the face of it, that seems absurd, since there is only one provider.
That particular statement is in the context of transferring a number from your previous cell phone. In that case, "your provider" is the provider of your previous cell phone.
No, it's not a problem with office programs, it's a problem with the idea that "What you see is all there is". I remember a while back someone attempted to blank out portions of a PDF document by giving lines of black text a black background... which of course didn't remove the confidential data from the file, just prevented naive users from seeing it.
This is why when the NSA releases redacted classified documents, they do it by printing out the document, going over it with a black marker, and then scanning the result back in and releasing the page images (nowadays, in PDF). Some people see that and think they're idiots, but really, they're just guaranteeing that what you see is all you get.
w3c.org . There's no better place to keep the standards related to the web.
I'd expand on that and say: whatever organization is responsible for developing the format that the DTD is for. The W3C is responsible for things like XHTML, so they should be hosting the DTD for it. The IETF should have the DTD for Atom. RSS is currently maintained by Harvard and the DTD should be maintained by them.
I'd say that's true and yet not true at the same time.
What Nintendo has chosen to do with the Zelda series has seemed to be to evolve it rather than do anything revolutionary. Twilight Princess has the same basic features as Ocarina of Time, for certain. It's very comfortable to the new fans. The game introduces several new and very interesting items that remarkably change the way the game plays as the game progresses, though. Things like the dual-hookshot (clawshot, whatever) and Dominion Rod allow some neat additions to the gameplay that make the game still interesting.
In a lot of ways, the later Zelda games are more like a (very large) expansion to the previous game rather than a new game. It's the same gameplay at the core, but the new details make it different enough that it's enjoyable.
Am I just naive in thinking that this proposal would have no effect on their Chinese operations? Let's say the Chinese government says "hey Google, play ball" and they say "no". What can the Chinese government do exactly?
First, they can revoke the google.cn name. Country code names are subject to the regulation of the country they're associated with.
Next, they can eliminate all of Google's operations in China. Google has employees and datacenters in China that are completely subject to Chinese law and can be shut down by order of the government.
Third, they can block resolution of google.com and any other Google-related name around the world. This already happens periodically to google.com, that's why they have google.cn, but they could do it completely.
Countries are more than able to control what does and doesn't go on within their borders. China could easily make Google completely inaccessible to its residents.
Nobody has the right to success, but everyone has the right to a fair and level playing field.
What about Google isn't a fair and level playing field? If it's unfair, that means that some sites are being given an advantage that others aren't. In the context of this discussion, which sites are those? Nobody knows how the algorithm works, so everyone is guessing. This guy's competitors guessed better than he did. He may have been unlucky, be he wasn't treated differently than some other site that did the same things he did would have been.
the answer will be B, while I thought it should find A.
Well, the algorithm operates in two passes. The first pass finds a candidate for the majority element. The second pass confirms whether or not that element is actually the majority element.
For A A A C C B B, there isn't a majority element. So you're right that the candidate finding pass will return B, but then the second pass will discover that B holds only 2 out of 7 slots, and thus will return that the sequence has no majority element.
College isn't the only place to you can learn theoretical computer science.
It's definitely not, but I'd expect that most people who haven't gone to college haven't gone ahead and learned it on their own. Recruiting and interviewing people costs money and time, so it's a question of how much return they expect to get on any particular investment.
That's the point exactly. The interviewer doesn't want to hear an immediate response of "oh, I'd use a radix sort". They want to hear you talk out your problem-solving process in real time, to see how close to their optimal solution you get in ten minutes' time and what ideas you might have for improving your first-pass solution if you had had more time.
Yeah, that's exactly what they're looking for, I think. When I was phone interviewed by Google, the interviewer asked me the majority finding problem, which I hadn't encountered before. I iterated through a few solutions but never came up with a solution that was better than O(n log n). I still got called back for an on site interview.
A fresh out of high school graduate, yes. But a high school grad who has been in the indsutry working for 4-5 years? No. Most of the time, he'll wipe the floor with the college graduate.
I always find it a little sad when people think you need schooling or a degree to truly know something. It's like they're putting artificial limitations on themselves.
I think that it's a bit different at Google than at some other places, at least for certain positions. A high school graduate that's been in the industry working for 4-5 years can certainly do a lot of jobs. But there's a huge benefit to studying theoretical computer science when you get into highly specialized fields like search, as well as trying to do things on Google's level (where things like scalability and algorithmic complexity are extremely important).
Basically, the industry worker may well know C++, Python, or the Windows API inside and out, but he probably wouldn't be able to explain why support vector machines usually perform better than Bayes classifiers or when mergesort should be used instead of quicksort.
Slashdot Mirror
Far out. I'll slap the next person who tells me Unix is hard to use, if that's Microsoft's idea of user-friendliness.
Because "-rw-r--r-- 1 root root" is so self-explanatory?
They said it was less than 3 months away in March, 2008.
Has there ever been a court verdict saying that the fourth amendment isn't valid here?
I believe so, under the grounds that you are voluntarily submitting to the search (by choosing to fly). You have the option of not flying, which wouldn't cause your stuff to be searched, so it's not a violation of the security of your effects.
It's like if a police officer came to your door and asked you to come inside. If you say that it's okay, and then they see something illegal inside your place, that's admissible in court, because you let them in voluntarily.
It's definitely the kind of thing that's borderline, since you do have travel options other than flying, but none of the other options are really equivalent in any way. I'm not entirely sure where I stand on the issue. I think the behind-the-scenes stupidity is ridiculous, of course, but I'm undecided about whether or not bag searches as a requirement to getting on a plane are ultimately a good or bad idea.
(the engines won't get any slower)
Clearly you haven't seen the plans for IE9.
That's pretty much what I thought. It's sort of like saying that if you change sh to be setuid (or, to be equivalent, copy sh to login) you can get root access on a Unix system.
Most of the perpetual motion machines that actually get a patent are because it's not submitted as "perpetual motion machine", it's some crazy complicated device that turns out to be a perpetual motion machine at its core, but that particular claim is buried among several hundred, or whatever.
Personally, I can't imagine that Stallman and others were ignorant of the idea of accessing software over a network, and they didn't make any effort to change the rules in GPL v3 to eliminate that use case, so I think he's somewhat on his own in that respect.
...the not-so-big names signed up was to swing around their corp-peens I guess :P
There are actually almost 1100 distinct licenses up for auction, and the vast majority of them are for regional licenses that will go for maybe a couple million dollars. That's what all the smaller companies are signing up for.
Is rudeness a badge of honor on slashdot (queue the you must be new here jokes)?
I'm not really sure, I'm new here.
Maybe that will eventually make it a "green" city.
Actually, in terms of average energy cost per resident, New York City is already one of the greenest cities in the US. Less than half of households own cars, 1 in 3 mass transit trips in the US is made on the NYC subway, and dense apartment buildings mean your excess heat and cooling leaks into your neighbor's residence instead of the air. If you were to take New York City's residents and change the population density to that of Suffolk County (the eastern county on Long Island), you would need an area the size of Maryland to house them.
In terms of environmental impact per square mile, New York City is certainly terrible, but in terms of environment impact per person (which is generally a better metric), New York City does fabulously.
The issue is that the "future version" clause means that you can use the code under one version OR another, not that the newer versions supersede the old. In other words, if GPLv2 says doing X is okay but Y is not, and GPLv3 says X is bad, but Y is good, then you can use code licensed in that manner by doing X or Y (or both, or neither).
Almost right. In legal English, "or" means exclusive or. So, when it says "or any future version" it means you get to pick a single version. Thus, if GPLv2 allows X and prohibits Y and version 3 allows Y and prohibits X, you can do only X, only Y, or neither, but you can't do both, because that would require somehow mixing the two licenses. You get to pick which license terms you want to adhere to, but you don't get to mix and match provisions of both.
one of the labels selling DRM free on Amazon is Universal, the same label that is in a fight against iTunes
And the company with the largest share of the music business.
Many of the numbers iSuppli comes up with are pretty much made up. Regardless, most news organizations assume that the entire difference between retail of the device and the iSuppli number is "pure profit," etc. - this is utter nonsense. Previous iSuppli numbers have been shot down by reason, I hope to see the same thing in this instance.
In this case, the author at Daring Fireball is aiming at the wrong target. iSuppli doesn't claim their numbers are anything other than what they are: the cost for the materials used in the product. They never claim that all the remaining portion is profit, if you read the actual press release, that's an interpretation provided by the media. iSuppli isn't screwing up here, it's just that reporters don't understand what they're reading.
To me, it's a terrible waste of money and technology. My parents would have gone mad if I had ever deliberately broken something as expensive as that.
Rich kids with too much free money to spend...
You do realize this is an advertisement, right? He's spending $500 on an iPhone, plus production costs, in order to sell what's likely to be thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of dollars in blenders. Not exactly a waste.
If you go through the apple demo of how to activate your iPhone, it says the time will vary "depending on your provider".
On the face of it, that seems absurd, since there is only one provider.
That particular statement is in the context of transferring a number from your previous cell phone. In that case, "your provider" is the provider of your previous cell phone.
No, it's not a problem with office programs, it's a problem with the idea that "What you see is all there is". I remember a while back someone attempted to blank out portions of a PDF document by giving lines of black text a black background... which of course didn't remove the confidential data from the file, just prevented naive users from seeing it.
This is why when the NSA releases redacted classified documents, they do it by printing out the document, going over it with a black marker, and then scanning the result back in and releasing the page images (nowadays, in PDF). Some people see that and think they're idiots, but really, they're just guaranteeing that what you see is all you get.
w3c.org . There's no better place to keep the standards related to the web.
I'd expand on that and say: whatever organization is responsible for developing the format that the DTD is for. The W3C is responsible for things like XHTML, so they should be hosting the DTD for it. The IETF should have the DTD for Atom. RSS is currently maintained by Harvard and the DTD should be maintained by them.
Twilights princess is the same as OoT.
I'd say that's true and yet not true at the same time.
What Nintendo has chosen to do with the Zelda series has seemed to be to evolve it rather than do anything revolutionary. Twilight Princess has the same basic features as Ocarina of Time, for certain. It's very comfortable to the new fans. The game introduces several new and very interesting items that remarkably change the way the game plays as the game progresses, though. Things like the dual-hookshot (clawshot, whatever) and Dominion Rod allow some neat additions to the gameplay that make the game still interesting.
In a lot of ways, the later Zelda games are more like a (very large) expansion to the previous game rather than a new game. It's the same gameplay at the core, but the new details make it different enough that it's enjoyable.
Am I just naive in thinking that this proposal would have no effect on their Chinese operations? Let's say the Chinese government says "hey Google, play ball" and they say "no". What can the Chinese government do exactly?
First, they can revoke the google.cn name. Country code names are subject to the regulation of the country they're associated with.
Next, they can eliminate all of Google's operations in China. Google has employees and datacenters in China that are completely subject to Chinese law and can be shut down by order of the government.
Third, they can block resolution of google.com and any other Google-related name around the world. This already happens periodically to google.com, that's why they have google.cn, but they could do it completely.
Countries are more than able to control what does and doesn't go on within their borders. China could easily make Google completely inaccessible to its residents.
Nobody has the right to success, but everyone has the right to a fair and level playing field.
What about Google isn't a fair and level playing field? If it's unfair, that means that some sites are being given an advantage that others aren't. In the context of this discussion, which sites are those? Nobody knows how the algorithm works, so everyone is guessing. This guy's competitors guessed better than he did. He may have been unlucky, be he wasn't treated differently than some other site that did the same things he did would have been.
Question about this majority finding problem:
If I got it right, with: A A A C C B B
the answer will be B, while I thought it should find A.
Well, the algorithm operates in two passes. The first pass finds a candidate for the majority element. The second pass confirms whether or not that element is actually the majority element.
For A A A C C B B, there isn't a majority element. So you're right that the candidate finding pass will return B, but then the second pass will discover that B holds only 2 out of 7 slots, and thus will return that the sequence has no majority element.
College isn't the only place to you can learn theoretical computer science.
It's definitely not, but I'd expect that most people who haven't gone to college haven't gone ahead and learned it on their own. Recruiting and interviewing people costs money and time, so it's a question of how much return they expect to get on any particular investment.
That's the point exactly. The interviewer doesn't want to hear an immediate response of "oh, I'd use a radix sort". They want to hear you talk out your problem-solving process in real time, to see how close to their optimal solution you get in ten minutes' time and what ideas you might have for improving your first-pass solution if you had had more time.
Yeah, that's exactly what they're looking for, I think. When I was phone interviewed by Google, the interviewer asked me the majority finding problem, which I hadn't encountered before. I iterated through a few solutions but never came up with a solution that was better than O(n log n). I still got called back for an on site interview.
A fresh out of high school graduate, yes. But a high school grad who has been in the indsutry working for 4-5 years? No. Most of the time, he'll wipe the floor with the college graduate.
I always find it a little sad when people think you need schooling or a degree to truly know something. It's like they're putting artificial limitations on themselves.
I think that it's a bit different at Google than at some other places, at least for certain positions. A high school graduate that's been in the industry working for 4-5 years can certainly do a lot of jobs. But there's a huge benefit to studying theoretical computer science when you get into highly specialized fields like search, as well as trying to do things on Google's level (where things like scalability and algorithmic complexity are extremely important).
Basically, the industry worker may well know C++, Python, or the Windows API inside and out, but he probably wouldn't be able to explain why support vector machines usually perform better than Bayes classifiers or when mergesort should be used instead of quicksort.