And use an electric-fence type circuit, short high-voltage low-energy pulses, to make it safe. Well, it won't be safe if the current goes through your heart somehow, which is why wear it like a watch, so both electrodes are on the same arm. I wired a morse-code receiver like this once, for cheating on history exams in high school (darn thing electrocuted itself half-way through the test, so much for learning morse).
The fact that it doesn't is a bug in the installer, not in Windows.
Especially considering that every other decent Windows app gets it right. It's not that difficult, given that Windows install scripts are generated by a tool. The right behaviour:
1. Don't, f*cking, install new version in the same dir as the old one by default.
Think very carefully which directories (like, some user dirs) you want ot share between the versions, which you don't want to share, and which files you want copied over (like, bookmarks, unless you do share them between versions).
This way, the user will by default have both versions installed side by side.
2. Offer the user an option (or remind him) to uninstall the old version when installing the new one.
Automatic update f*cked up my installation (on Windows), and I had to reinstall the whole thing, including manually deleting portions of my user profile. Funky. Considering amount of work it takes to set up all the extensions after every upgrade, triple funky. I'd say, worse than upgrading IE4 to IE5, may they both RIP.
Sun trasking systems are similar to tracking systems used to control amature telescopes. Cheap and efficient, usually microprocessor-controlled, with a 2-axis stepper-motor drive. Or something. About $50 in parts altogether, and there should be plenty of plans available in amature telescope knowledge base. You wish I wasn't too lazy to google for it...
You don't need to know geometry or optics at all to do this. All you need is a large bunch of people holding half-decent flat mirrors steadily enough, and pointing the reflections at roughly the same spot. Each reflection is roughly the brightness of the sun, asuming perfect reflectivity. If the reflectivity is less than 100%, you're gonna need more people.
If they really do point all the reflections at the same spot, then the number_of_mirrors * reflectivity = power_amplification. If the death ray guy easily sets wood on fire with his 112 mirrors, the greeks could do that too.
The best mirrors for the task would be flat, since with concave mirrors you could only focus light at the focal distance, and you can't control where the ships are. Flat mirrors would give the same power amplification at any distance.
The real questions are:
1. With Greek tech, can you really make a mirror flat enough to reflect a beam that stays parallel for at least 20-30 yards?
2. With Greek tech, just how reflective can you make a mirror?
Still, if those Greeks could procure some 200 really flat shields, and polish them to a high shine (after all, modern first-surface metallic mirrors are only second to dichroics, and only in narrow-spectrum applications), they could feasably have 200 guys pointing the reflected beams at one spot some 50 yards away for a long enough time to set wood on fire.
As the experiment goes, building a replica ship was a waste of time, of course. And they probably didn't have enough mirrors. For a realistic experiment I'd just use some cheap $3 wall mirrors from home depot, and some old wood box 50 yards away. A longer distance would make it difficult to poin the beam.
Whenever I can legally do with it exactly the same things I can do with a book, including:
1. After the copyright expires, I can give copies away, or sell them.
2. Sell my copy.
3. Format shift, just like I can scan a book into a text file, and read it off my PDA screen, without loss of quality to the content. Also, I can make backup copies, as many as I need, for my own use, just like I can xerox a book.
4. Fair use copy, i.e. copy and distribute excerpts as allowed by fair use concept in copyright.
Now, I won't ask that it be easy to do all that, just like it's not easy to xerox a book. Just that it be legal for me to do. In other words, if not for DMCA, I would accept any DRM that I can break. With DMCA, however, I won't, because DMCA makes breaking DRM illegal.
In other words, your "rights" are not being violated by DRM.
No. They are being violated by DMCA that prevents you from legally removing DRM.
Before DMCA they could do DRM, but thay couldn't stop you from breaking it and re-selling your file. Now, you can go to jail for it, even though it's your right to re-sell the file. That's the thing with DMCA - it allows "them" to stop "you" from exercising your legal rights under copyright law by merely declaring that the content is encrypted.
I don't see how this is different from adding 127.0.0.1 in front of each line in the blacklist and dumping it in/etc/hosts (or wherever you version of Windows has it) locally on your machine.
This law is not at all unconstitutional, or bad for your freedom in any way, mind you, since it's an opt-in block. It's just stupid, 'cause equivalent means are already present in existing technology. The problem this law is trying to solve is technical, not legal. The governor is a moron, and so is his whole crew.
Appearently, a wikipedia page says that perl RE are Turing complete. I can't find a proof. I can't figure out a way to do a^nb^nc^n in perl RE either, which is an indication that it could well be a mistake in wikipedia.
Hmm.. Just what enhancements to regex are there that make them Turing-complete? If you don't mind, kindly write an expression that recognizes "a^nb^nc^n", where ^n means n repetitions of the previous letter.
Just to show off my (again) great knowledge of the patent law I will note here that, judging by what's being done with old computer game clones, gameplay is not patentable in the US at all. So there...
Are you in the states? Our patents last for 20 years, ever since, like, about some 15 years ago. The first 20-year patents haven't expired yet, I think.
iPod shuffle is a piece of crap, and the people who have it are all idiots. I mean, the darn thing doesn't even let you choose the album to play. One must be a real bumbling bee to buy sumthing like that:-)
You're right, this thing is not breaking DMCA. It's only breaking Apple's EULA. Besides, since the content that you pay for, that actually comes down the wire, is not encrypted, I doubt the HYMN is actually breaking DMCA either. Too bad IANAL.
This is probably because Apple doesn't really want to DRM the music it sells. It makes them look stupid, and it hurts the sales. It's the content owners that make them do it, so there's no wonder they do it only half-heartedly. Apple will most definitely go after all the DRM-removal programs that appear, and chase them off US soil (or even Indian soil), but it's not in their best interest to extinguish them completely.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the ability to read and correctly key a code requires a level of consiousness similar to searching a room.
You mean you think you could effectively search a room in the middle of an overnight coding session?
Just wear it like a watch, maybe?
And use an electric-fence type circuit, short high-voltage low-energy pulses, to make it safe. Well, it won't be safe if the current goes through your heart somehow, which is why wear it like a watch, so both electrodes are on the same arm. I wired a morse-code receiver like this once, for cheating on history exams in high school (darn thing electrocuted itself half-way through the test, so much for learning morse).
The fact that it doesn't is a bug in the installer, not in Windows.
Especially considering that every other decent Windows app gets it right. It's not that difficult, given that Windows install scripts are generated by a tool. The right behaviour:
1. Don't, f*cking, install new version in the same dir as the old one by default.
Think very carefully which directories (like, some user dirs) you want ot share between the versions, which you don't want to share, and which files you want copied over (like, bookmarks, unless you do share them between versions).
This way, the user will by default have both versions installed side by side.
2. Offer the user an option (or remind him) to uninstall the old version when installing the new one.
Automatic update f*cked up my installation (on Windows), and I had to reinstall the whole thing, including manually deleting portions of my user profile. Funky. Considering amount of work it takes to set up all the extensions after every upgrade, triple funky. I'd say, worse than upgrading IE4 to IE5, may they both RIP.
Sun trasking systems are similar to tracking systems used to control amature telescopes. Cheap and efficient, usually microprocessor-controlled, with a 2-axis stepper-motor drive. Or something. About $50 in parts altogether, and there should be plenty of plans available in amature telescope knowledge base. You wish I wasn't too lazy to google for it...
You don't need to know geometry or optics at all to do this. All you need is a large bunch of people holding half-decent flat mirrors steadily enough, and pointing the reflections at roughly the same spot. Each reflection is roughly the brightness of the sun, asuming perfect reflectivity. If the reflectivity is less than 100%, you're gonna need more people.
If they really do point all the reflections at the same spot, then the number_of_mirrors * reflectivity = power_amplification. If the death ray guy easily sets wood on fire with his 112 mirrors, the greeks could do that too.
The best mirrors for the task would be flat, since with concave mirrors you could only focus light at the focal distance, and you can't control where the ships are. Flat mirrors would give the same power amplification at any distance.
The real questions are:
1. With Greek tech, can you really make a mirror flat enough to reflect a beam that stays parallel for at least 20-30 yards?
2. With Greek tech, just how reflective can you make a mirror?
Still, if those Greeks could procure some 200 really flat shields, and polish them to a high shine (after all, modern first-surface metallic mirrors are only second to dichroics, and only in narrow-spectrum applications), they could feasably have 200 guys pointing the reflected beams at one spot some 50 yards away for a long enough time to set wood on fire.
As the experiment goes, building a replica ship was a waste of time, of course. And they probably didn't have enough mirrors. For a realistic experiment I'd just use some cheap $3 wall mirrors from home depot, and some old wood box 50 yards away. A longer distance would make it difficult to poin the beam.
My bad. The reason - either my office doesn't get the toolbar, or I turned it off somehow a long time ago and forgot all about it..
Uncheck this:
Edit>Preferences>Startup>Show Messages and automatically update
The banner goes away, and, as a bonus, if you have auto-update disabled, the stupid app stops tickling the network too.
C'mon gentlemen, this is not worth a slashdot article. Next time start your engines before flooring the pedal.
That doesn't work (tried it). What's n? According to perl syntax it's supposed to be an expression...
Whenever I can legally do with it exactly the same things I can do with a book, including:
1. After the copyright expires, I can give copies away, or sell them.
2. Sell my copy.
3. Format shift, just like I can scan a book into a text file, and read it off my PDA screen, without loss of quality to the content. Also, I can make backup copies, as many as I need, for my own use, just like I can xerox a book.
4. Fair use copy, i.e. copy and distribute excerpts as allowed by fair use concept in copyright.
Now, I won't ask that it be easy to do all that, just like it's not easy to xerox a book. Just that it be legal for me to do. In other words, if not for DMCA, I would accept any DRM that I can break. With DMCA, however, I won't, because DMCA makes breaking DRM illegal.
In other words, your "rights" are not being violated by DRM.
No. They are being violated by DMCA that prevents you from legally removing DRM.
Before DMCA they could do DRM, but thay couldn't stop you from breaking it and re-selling your file. Now, you can go to jail for it, even though it's your right to re-sell the file. That's the thing with DMCA - it allows "them" to stop "you" from exercising your legal rights under copyright law by merely declaring that the content is encrypted.
I don't see how this is different from adding 127.0.0.1 in front of each line in the blacklist and dumping it in /etc/hosts (or wherever you version of Windows has it) locally on your machine.
This law is not at all unconstitutional, or bad for your freedom in any way, mind you, since it's an opt-in block. It's just stupid, 'cause equivalent means are already present in existing technology. The problem this law is trying to solve is technical, not legal. The governor is a moron, and so is his whole crew.
Appearently, a wikipedia page says that perl RE are Turing complete. I can't find a proof. I can't figure out a way to do a^nb^nc^n in perl RE either, which is an indication that it could well be a mistake in wikipedia.
Hmm..
Just what enhancements to regex are there that make them Turing-complete? If you don't mind, kindly write an expression that recognizes "a^nb^nc^n", where ^n means n repetitions of the previous letter.
And, of course, you're right.
Just to show off my (again) great knowledge of the patent law I will note here that, judging by what's being done with old computer game clones, gameplay is not patentable in the US at all. So there...
Why is [A-z] wrong
Because there are some characters between the letters Z and a in ASCII.
what's the correct way to do it?
[A-Za-z] - for us-ascii, or
[:alpha:] - for other charsets, if your system supports it.
Regular expressions are probably the first Turing-complete language to be encapsulated in another Turing-complete language (C).
Don't you just love to sound like a StarTrek character, with all that fancy terminology?
Go look up your complexity book - if you have one - regexes are not even close to Turing-complete.
..how ass-like they would look suing DVD Jon... again!
Besides, I really don't think there was anything illegal in his hack this time. Even with the U.S. DMCA included into consideration.
If he was after $$$, what he could do is:
1. Incorporate ASAP and transfer whatever assets he has to the corporation;
2. Hire a lawyer with some % of the assets;
3. Hire himself as CEO and pay the rest of the assets to himself as salary;
4. Wait for the money to end, then declare the corporation bankrupt;
5. Start a new corporation with a slightly new name, board artwork, and the text of the rules;
6. THEN get slashdotted to transfer his old customer base.
7. At this point he's still got most of his cash, and hasbro has no way of getting their hands on any of it, and his business is still operating.
Patents only last for 14 years
Are you in the states? Our patents last for 20 years, ever since, like, about some 15 years ago. The first 20-year patents haven't expired yet, I think.
A ground down screwdriver is a ground down screwdriver, even though its called an awl.
iPod shuffle is a piece of crap, and the people who have it are all idiots. I mean, the darn thing doesn't even let you choose the album to play. One must be a real bumbling bee to buy sumthing like that:-)
You're right, this thing is not breaking DMCA. It's only breaking Apple's EULA. Besides, since the content that you pay for, that actually comes down the wire, is not encrypted, I doubt the HYMN is actually breaking DMCA either. Too bad IANAL.
This is probably because Apple doesn't really want to DRM the music it sells. It makes them look stupid, and it hurts the sales. It's the content owners that make them do it, so there's no wonder they do it only half-heartedly. Apple will most definitely go after all the DRM-removal programs that appear, and chase them off US soil (or even Indian soil), but it's not in their best interest to extinguish them completely.
I don't get it... Are you trying to brag here about actually having a working setup with RH8 over 2.6.1?