I've never seen a 3D printer that could take recycle stock. RepRap Mendel doesn't; that would be an interesting project: a heated hopper that feeds raw feedstock into the extruder as a liquid stream, rather than a wire filament.
Try living in America with a towel on your head and see how long you last you camel riding hippie. You can be disappeared just because the government doesn't like you; they even have an organization that will grope your balls until you miss your flight to keep dirty Arabs off planes.
So, a device by which you need to understand how numbers work--how adding 6 to 17 means you add 10 and subtract 4, and so on--is equivalent to a device where you punch in buttons and a magical display shows you the answer without putting any onus on you to perform the process?
I can only assume you can't use a soroban, and think teaching by Matlab is a good way to teach math.
ReactOS, but there's little manpower and it's a very slow project. Reverse engineering the entire Windows codebase, documenting it in a technical manner, then having another person read the document and write original code (without seeing an explanation of code flow, just of what a particular function ultimately does to input data and to the system state) to implement it.
It's not a good example because it's huge (reverse engineer an entire completed--and ever-changing!--product) and it's very slow.
Math isn't hard. It's easy. It's amazingly easy. What's hard is breaking through from simply memorising tons of details (which is rather difficult) to comprehension. Once you comprehend and begin thinking in a mathematical view, it's another language and a rather simple one at that (try learning French, with all those blasted dialects!)
I do arithmetic via soroban. My coworker thinks it's ridiculous because I'm slow... but I'm getting faster. I showed her some stuff, massive addition problem for a beginner, 5 numbers 4 digits each to add. At points I just handwaved, clicking beads around like, "And... I didn't really think that through, just trust me, it's the right operation." Half the time I have no idea what the hell I'm doing; I just toggle five and add two and tick one on the next column or something, because with all the overflows (half register: 5 and 1, if you add 2 and add 5 and you wind up toggling 5 but it already is set, you overflow 1 or -1 into the next column depending on the operation, simple as that) it winds up coming out that way.
My brain starts working the same way. All that toggling and shifting and overflowing... I look at a pile of numbers and just add them up, sometimes I skip adding a couple digits because I know this is going to raise the next order of magnitude one and drop this by 3 (adding 7 to 3 or more for example) or some such, but the groupings have become reflex as I go. Usually I'm not sure the answer is right, because I haven't computed, counted step by step (67 + 16 = 6... 7, 7? , 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 + 10 = 83; instead, 6 + 7 = 7 +10 -4 = 13. By the way, 7 across 5 is 5 + 2, add 6 is add 10 subtract 4, subtract 4 is add 1 subtract 5, click click click you lose the 5 and get 2 + 1... when it's instinct, you just see 2 + 1 + 10).
Numbers are no longer intimidating. Let's now move on to algebra. You want a good, strong foundation in algebra, because it founds geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, physics, and so on. I don't want to hear your crap about learning calculus; calculus is irrelevant. If someone masters algebra absolutely and you show them the rules of calculus, they will master calculus in an afternoon.
The way you do this is you start to blur the boundaries. Geometry is applied algebra. Area of a rectangle is L * W, volume of a cube LWH, a triangle is a bisected rectangle LW/2. The day you enter algebra, we're trying to explain this variable thing, 2x + 4 = 14, solve for X. What you do is equivalent operations across the equal sign yes, okay, now what? LW = A, LWH = V, we'll give you everything but one and you can figure it out.
I have a math textbook from the mid 90s that teaches algebra by referencing real world examples and forward calls into Geometry, as well as eventual forays into graphing calculators and computer programs--but it only teaches that stuff as an aside. As opposed to College Algebra Enhanced with Graphing Utilities 5e, which handwaves the algebra away and immediately centers focus on using graphing calculators to solve all your problems--a favorite these past few years in introductory college algebra classes!-- Elementary and Intermediate Algebra, A Combined Course, by McKeague, focuses heavily on applying algebra to further maths and to real world examples.
On top of that, I also own ANOTHER textbook that bridges Algebra and Geometry--it's intended to teach a course after elementary Algebra, but before entering Geometry. It's called Understanding Elementary Algebra with Geometry. Oh dear me, a time waster, a course for understanding what we just taught you--you should know this stuff from last year! I don't care; this is important.
I don't care if we can't shuffle kids out of high school with Calc 3. Here's an outline for you:
Grades 1-2: Soroban addition and subtraction. You will learn to comfortably do lots and lots of basic arithmetic quickly. Addition and
Well we know the motivation for Symantec, F-Secure, and eEye--they have products they want to get merit points for ("we found it first!") and want to be technically ahead for ("we protect against things the industry doesn't know about yet!"). A good vulnerability in the Windows RPC service can go for a good $5000 to eEye if it's severe enough, one shot--people make a living on this stuff.
I mentioned SI Government Solutions, a Florida based company. I'm not astroturfing; they're the only company I know that contracts out these specialized skills, both to government and commercial entities. Raytheon bought them eventually.
Remember d00mforums or whoever hacks DVD player software 9 hours after it comes out. Crack the keys for the new copy protection scheme a week after that scheme was put out... first find the algorithm in some code, then pull keys from a known software player, ok here's your decoder. DVD John is well known for this, it's his thing; GeoHot is a pansy that picks up at the end of everyone else's hard work and claims it for his own egowank. I have a brilliant former coworker who is bored with his desk job and has been teaching himself to tear apart malware and completely analyze it start to finish--efficiently. This is genius level stuff, for sure; you see Maksim playing his piano, you know you can't do that, maybe if you spent your whole life doing it since you were 3 you could but still that guy is something special. Still, you could learn to play piano at performance grade in a few years, just like everyone else--and there are plenty of sharply talented players out there.
HDDVD didn't last even a month, BluRay didn't make it a few weeks. Amateurs. A month is nothing when we're talking about getting our hands on some high-value trade secrets--they're secret because they provide a competitive advantage. $100,000 isn't a year's income for a good business.
In RCT you don't build food courts because guests got lost; so I would build a 9x9 pave with an info booth in the center and make that my food court. Profits like crazy: my guests bought maps guaranteed, then never got lost. They also bought tons of food and drinks. That thing was a cash printing operation.
Only on software engineers have the delusion that decompiling source == understanding source == reproducing functionality of that source.
He has "Algorithms" that are particularly interesting. Strips of code that do fun and interesting things. It's not hard to work that out. What's hard to work out is the entire codebase: the XUL interface processor, drawing on the screen, calling the TCP stack, menus and callbacks, back-end functionality (for example, a reflow mechanism in a Web browser). Small, self-contained pieces are simple: the parsing algorithm for a Web browser is going to be a bunch of code calling a bunch of other code you will quickly mark off and ignore. If you miss something, you'll have this stuff sketched out so you can come back to it.
All someone has to do is identify a part of the image processing algorithm by identifying a call into the operating system to get image data from an input device and following the flow path. Mark off the memory where the image is stored, watch things that access it. It's some legwork, but it's by no means impossible.
By the way, $60k-$120k/year is typical for people who just bust these things all fucking day. The people at Semantec, at McAfee, at F-Secure, at SI Government Solutions, they spend all day reverse engineering and mapping programs, breaking anti-debugging protections, breaking anti-disassembly protections, the works. They learn patterns, they learn to recognize pieces and to use strategies that become routine and mechanical. It's a lot like playing Go.
No God-like powers here. Nor for the people who cracked A/52 or any other encryption algo that sucked and was proprietary--a task that involves first isolating the algorithm (people do this in an afternoon) and second finding a mathematical flaw in it (this can take years or decades). People are always pulling proprietary algorithms out of binary code.
Isn't this the issue from a week or two ago where some senator stepped up to choke it off because he thought it would cause GPS interference, and 80% of the Slashdot comments were, "I don't get it, he's in the Healthcare Industry's deep pockets, why is he bothering himself with the communications industry?"
Your code is trivial to reverse engineer; binary code doesn't hide trade secrets. Look up the IDA Pro book on No Starch Press, then have at it on some code out there. One book. A month and a half. Learn to use the online debugger to bypass anti-debugging facilities (yes, I said that) and disassembly traps.
Well, T-Mobile charged me $90/mo for "Classic" on contract and $70/mo for "Value" without contract--same plan. The 2 year contract adds $480 to your phone service costs; I got a $320 phone for $50 plus $20 x 24 = $480, total $530 I paid for it. But I broke my contract for $50 eventually, dropped the required $30/mo Android service and got the $10/mo 2GB limited data service instead, saved myself $40 overall.
At least the phone insurance was viable. Asurion charged $7/mo and the copay for the phone was $160. For a Motorola V3 RAZR it was last $5/mo (might be $7 now) and the copay was $50; a brand new Motorola V3 Razr, at the time, cost $50--or free with 2 year contract that cost $480 over 2 years. Yes, that means you can pay $480 for a $50 phone AND pay $5/mo to have an insurance coverage for loss or damage with a $50 copay to get the $50 phone.
3) you don't practice what you preach (posting on Slashdot rather than feeding starving children); 4) spending other peoples' money isn't charity; and 5) ignoring that your example, the neighbor who had thrown away 30 odd boxes, had covered the cost of their wastage.
On point (3), I am advocating a non-cost solution--you don,t pay for the vegetable scraps you're throwing away.
On point (4), what spending of other peoples' money? Explain to me this. You spend $5 on vegetables, you generate vegetable scraps that go into landfill; or you spend $5 on vegetables, you generate vegetable scraps that go into compost. In the landfilling scenario, there is a cost of disposal and management to society, paid for in taxes; in the composting scenario, there is revenue generated from the composted product (sold to farmers), which pays for the cost of running the thing (and beyond). Same for recycling. If, however, people don't contribute enough--if they throw things into the trash instead of the recycling or compost bins--then you can't break the critical point to cover (and exceed) the initial costs. It seems to me that NOT recycling and NOT composting is spending other peoples' money.
On point (5), the neighbor had to cover the cost, yes. See, if the neighbor had donated that stuff, recycled stuff, and so on, then the neighbor would not have been--get this--assessed a punitive fine for not doing these things. The neighbor is not free to throw away her stuff like that; it is mandatory to retain her waste in her house and only put it out for trash pickup at a maximum flow rate, or to dispose of it in recycling or charitable donations. She has failed to follow the rules, and thus has been fined.
Many states have a "Bottle Bill" by which they collect empty containers. These states routinely generate more revenue from the effort than the cost of administrating it, and have less trash in the streets because trash is worth money; the revenue goes to other environmental efforts, usually, as sort of a thematic thing. Solon, Ohio, has a robust single stream recycling program and composting program that brings in a HUGE amount of revenue and has eliminated almost ALL landfill waste--compost is sold back to citizens at $2/bag ($1 to seniors). Solon also has a once-per-month collection of uncommon, difficult, and hazardous wastes such as car batteries, paint, carpet padding, oil, propane cylinders, and the like. Solon, Ohio is known to be one of the best places in the world to live.
You banter the word "freedom" like a mantra, but you seem to not understand what freedom is. You seem to want the freedom to harm society, and your arguments are ineffable--arguing that you shouldn't be burdened with putting something in a bin one foot to the right of another bin, yet also arguing that punishing someone for not doing exactly that is fine. You've maintained the same position while arguing both for and against it, with no coherent argument for. That indicates your position is wrong or that you are a mindless drone with no clue what you're arguing about.
Let's try targeting this one. You say "Spending other peoples' money isn't charity" and that you don't want to "force the citizens to sacrifice." What other peoples' money is being spent, and what sacrifice are citizens making? Explain. Remember the context: You are throwing an object into the TRASH, to be dragged away and destroyed, with no compensation to you; instead, we want you to put it in a pile next to the trash, so that we can also drag it away but give it to another person (in some form) rather than destroying it.
force the citizens to sacrifice to cover the rest of the need.
YOU are throwing something away. Those shoes? That shirt? You put them in the trash.
I am paying taxes for our government-run trash service to landfill things, and possibly to haul away your trash. The more trash you generate, the more this costs.
Now tell me: What sacrifice are you making putting those shoes in the trash bag marked "Charity" for Purple Heart or Salvation Army to take off your door step, rather than putting them in that other bag marked "Trash"? You know, the bag that's filled with all the crap that you'd otherwise throw out, using the same number of bags but instead filling them with a mixture of trash and reusable items?
It looks to me like you've set up a good range of strawmen and undistributed middles. You've argued about sacrifice--about the charity of giving away that which you would profit by keeping, your time or your money or your worldly goods--and about the imposition of sacrifice on people. And yet we are talking about food that you've decided to not eat, that you would throw in the trash, and instead there is a bin right next to the trash that you throw such things into for the city to come collect and handle. And the kick is that this ultimately benefits you: there is revenue generated by the city reselling this, and a cost reduction on the economy by the availability of a much cheaper good to fill a need--lower taxes and lower food costs to you. And yet you stack this up against the ideal of charity, of giving away your worldly possessions to your own disadvantage in order to better the lives of others.
And here's my non-strawman: You use the city's landfills and you use the city's collection services. If you dispose of excess trash, you can pay an excess fine to cover those costs so that I don't have to pay more in taxes, or you can take your trash to the landfill yourself--where you will be forced to sort it before dumping--and pay the fees to dump there, which are included in the city (or private, who charges additional fees for excess) trash collection taxes (or fees). If you don't wish to face THAT, you can find a way to dispose of such things yourself--as long as you don't create a problem for everyone else (toxic/smelly air, waste leak into the water table, lowering property values around your landfill back yard, animals, etc). I refuse to sacrifice for your stubborn, borderline malicious behavior.
You, sir, are a madman or a simple fool. I can only surmise--with the complete lack of actual physical sacrifice involved--that your vendetta against these kinds of societal waste management and reuse plans represents a fear of making an emotional sacrifice, that being that you feel the need to exert your ego and your control over those around you to show that you do not have to stand with your fellow man, and will indeed stand against him for no idealistic reason other than because you don't want to be told what to do--even when your actions negatively impact those around you. Buy a ruler and take up measuring your penis; it harms fewer people.
It's not about rights. You purport that the loss of an individual's private property is a loss to the individual alone. I purport that, when the individual seeks to dispose of a good, two options of equal cost (or value) to the individual appear: a disposal method that destroys the good and a disposal method that relinquishes it to another member of society.
When an initiative has an impact on a general sector of society--farmers, the poor, a self-selected social group (such as Apple cultists)--it has an impact on "Society" by shifting the general supply and demand. To some degree, an impact on even a single person impacts "Society" by changing how their money is spent--but very, very small impacts are effectively meaningless by the "give a man to fish" principle (the cobbler does not care about ONE pair of shoes ever; he cares slightly about ONE pair of shoes per year, as small as that is).
Thus if you release your private property that you intend to dispose of, "Society" in general avoids a cost (tax, etc.). If this becomes a general trend--composting of food waste you were going to landfill anyway--then a product can be made and distributed at reduced cost. In some cases, that reduced cost can become a targeted tax at a lower rate: if the government collects enough compostable material, it can resell that compost to farmers for a profit at a lower cost than manufactured fertilizers, which reduces the amount of tax the government must collect to bring the same revenue AND reduces the overall costs to farmers EVEN THOUGH the government is effectively making up the difference in reduced tax on everyone by taking that money entirely from the farmers. The farmer pays less in taxes AND on materials, people pay less in taxes, food costs go down, available wealth in society increases.
In which case we develop a callous society that doesn't help anyone, and where momentary failure is punished by eternal damnation; or a society with too many entitlements--such as BASIC WELFARE AND UNEMPLOYMENT--which we all are made to pay, and which aren't aided by the taking of property which has been voluntarily released by its prior owner (because the prior owner preferred to release it to destruction).
So IF FOOD STAMPS EXIST, then your neighbor's destruction of their own property that they no longer want costs YOU money.
Right now I could accuse you of wanting to end welfare, unemployment, and all other social services--if you get fired, become homeless, can't get a job because you are a dirty bum, and nobody wants to help you because you live in a selfish community, then you should die. That argument is, however, illogical; instead I will accuse you of advocating a situation which demands either the elimination of welfare or an increase in financial burden on me because you feel like destroying something you no longer have a use for rather than releasing it as a supply to others who need such a thing.
You argue for the freedom to harm others through your worthless destruction. I believe we do found our important concepts of freedom--for example, your own argument--on the belief that one person's rights are bound by the impact on others' rights. You are now harming others' rights to life, or forcing a greater encroachment on their right to their own property (money, taken in taxes); destroying a perfectly serviceable pair of shoes that have become tattered and ugly leaves another person barefoot, or society paying to support said person by buying another pair of shoes--and to no gain for yourself except the satisfaction of inflicting your poor behavior onto others.
So what would you prefer? That others are left to go without their needs met, when the means to meet those needs are no longer useful to you and being thrown out? In that case, others are suffering because you have decided to destroy something of no value to you, but great value to them. You have profited exactly zero by this destruction, and would suffer exactly zero loss by placing it in a separate bag marked "Donation" (salvation army comes door to door in some places).
By your actions, to no advantage to yourself, you harm others; by other actions, to no additional workload on yourself, you could have helped others. While one person has refused to go hungry for a day so that another may eat a good meal for once, YOU have satisfied yourself and then POISONED the remaining food in the face of beggars pale and weak with hunger. You have diminished the wealth of society, and for that you owe it a debt.
Do not confuse the retention of your own means for your own ends with the destruction of means no longer useful to you but extremely valuable to others. A man has a right to his property, his money, his food, and his time, and serves himself at the expense of others always to some degree; but a man has no excuse to disservice others for no gain to himself and in the face of no inconvenience to help them. Such a man is a villain.
You are wrong, of course. Imagine that farmers pay good money for petroleum and mined mineral nutrients, which involve the labor of mining, processing (with whatever chemicals), maintaining machines, etc. They use this fertilizer to grow plants and other food. Said food is used and leaves waste which is composted--which involves the reduced labor of collecting, piling, occasionally turning.
This compost is cheaper to manufacture--requires less labor (chemicals that must be mined and made, machines that must be made from materials that must be mined, labor to remove things from the ground, etc.). The farmer now has access to an effective replacement for part of his ground nutrient needs, and no longer needs to spend as much money to grow food.
This means food is now cheaper to produce (which in theory means farmers should price war for an edge; in reality, that may happen BUT futures speculators will fuck up the market as we run it now). This frees up labor resources for making food, shifting the monetary costs into other economic areas. A net gain for society.
Economics does not happen in a bubble. Why do you think monopolies are bad for consumers?
Slashdot Mirror
I've never seen a 3D printer that could take recycle stock. RepRap Mendel doesn't; that would be an interesting project: a heated hopper that feeds raw feedstock into the extruder as a liquid stream, rather than a wire filament.
Try living in America with a towel on your head and see how long you last you camel riding hippie. You can be disappeared just because the government doesn't like you; they even have an organization that will grope your balls until you miss your flight to keep dirty Arabs off planes.
Freedom, liberty, and survival are relevant here.
So, a device by which you need to understand how numbers work--how adding 6 to 17 means you add 10 and subtract 4, and so on--is equivalent to a device where you punch in buttons and a magical display shows you the answer without putting any onus on you to perform the process?
I can only assume you can't use a soroban, and think teaching by Matlab is a good way to teach math.
How about not using shitware?
ReactOS, but there's little manpower and it's a very slow project. Reverse engineering the entire Windows codebase, documenting it in a technical manner, then having another person read the document and write original code (without seeing an explanation of code flow, just of what a particular function ultimately does to input data and to the system state) to implement it.
It's not a good example because it's huge (reverse engineer an entire completed--and ever-changing!--product) and it's very slow.
Almost but not entirely unlike tea?
Math isn't hard. It's easy. It's amazingly easy. What's hard is breaking through from simply memorising tons of details (which is rather difficult) to comprehension. Once you comprehend and begin thinking in a mathematical view, it's another language and a rather simple one at that (try learning French, with all those blasted dialects!)
I do arithmetic via soroban. My coworker thinks it's ridiculous because I'm slow ... but I'm getting faster. I showed her some stuff, massive addition problem for a beginner, 5 numbers 4 digits each to add. At points I just handwaved, clicking beads around like, "And ... I didn't really think that through, just trust me, it's the right operation." Half the time I have no idea what the hell I'm doing; I just toggle five and add two and tick one on the next column or something, because with all the overflows (half register: 5 and 1, if you add 2 and add 5 and you wind up toggling 5 but it already is set, you overflow 1 or -1 into the next column depending on the operation, simple as that) it winds up coming out that way.
My brain starts working the same way. All that toggling and shifting and overflowing ... I look at a pile of numbers and just add them up, sometimes I skip adding a couple digits because I know this is going to raise the next order of magnitude one and drop this by 3 (adding 7 to 3 or more for example) or some such, but the groupings have become reflex as I go. Usually I'm not sure the answer is right, because I haven't computed, counted step by step (67 + 16 = 6 ... 7, 7? , 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 + 10 = 83; instead, 6 + 7 = 7 +10 -4 = 13. By the way, 7 across 5 is 5 + 2, add 6 is add 10 subtract 4, subtract 4 is add 1 subtract 5, click click click you lose the 5 and get 2 + 1... when it's instinct, you just see 2 + 1 + 10).
Numbers are no longer intimidating. Let's now move on to algebra. You want a good, strong foundation in algebra, because it founds geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, physics, and so on. I don't want to hear your crap about learning calculus; calculus is irrelevant. If someone masters algebra absolutely and you show them the rules of calculus, they will master calculus in an afternoon.
The way you do this is you start to blur the boundaries. Geometry is applied algebra. Area of a rectangle is L * W, volume of a cube LWH, a triangle is a bisected rectangle LW/2. The day you enter algebra, we're trying to explain this variable thing, 2x + 4 = 14, solve for X. What you do is equivalent operations across the equal sign yes, okay, now what? LW = A, LWH = V, we'll give you everything but one and you can figure it out.
I have a math textbook from the mid 90s that teaches algebra by referencing real world examples and forward calls into Geometry, as well as eventual forays into graphing calculators and computer programs--but it only teaches that stuff as an aside. As opposed to College Algebra Enhanced with Graphing Utilities 5e, which handwaves the algebra away and immediately centers focus on using graphing calculators to solve all your problems--a favorite these past few years in introductory college algebra classes!-- Elementary and Intermediate Algebra, A Combined Course, by McKeague, focuses heavily on applying algebra to further maths and to real world examples.
On top of that, I also own ANOTHER textbook that bridges Algebra and Geometry--it's intended to teach a course after elementary Algebra, but before entering Geometry. It's called Understanding Elementary Algebra with Geometry. Oh dear me, a time waster, a course for understanding what we just taught you--you should know this stuff from last year! I don't care; this is important.
I don't care if we can't shuffle kids out of high school with Calc 3. Here's an outline for you:
Grades 1-2: Soroban addition and subtraction. You will learn to comfortably do lots and lots of basic arithmetic quickly. Addition and
This is why I advocate teaching early math with a Soroban... sigh.
Well we know the motivation for Symantec, F-Secure, and eEye--they have products they want to get merit points for ("we found it first!") and want to be technically ahead for ("we protect against things the industry doesn't know about yet!"). A good vulnerability in the Windows RPC service can go for a good $5000 to eEye if it's severe enough, one shot--people make a living on this stuff.
I mentioned SI Government Solutions, a Florida based company. I'm not astroturfing; they're the only company I know that contracts out these specialized skills, both to government and commercial entities. Raytheon bought them eventually.
Remember d00mforums or whoever hacks DVD player software 9 hours after it comes out. Crack the keys for the new copy protection scheme a week after that scheme was put out... first find the algorithm in some code, then pull keys from a known software player, ok here's your decoder. DVD John is well known for this, it's his thing; GeoHot is a pansy that picks up at the end of everyone else's hard work and claims it for his own egowank. I have a brilliant former coworker who is bored with his desk job and has been teaching himself to tear apart malware and completely analyze it start to finish--efficiently. This is genius level stuff, for sure; you see Maksim playing his piano, you know you can't do that, maybe if you spent your whole life doing it since you were 3 you could but still that guy is something special. Still, you could learn to play piano at performance grade in a few years, just like everyone else--and there are plenty of sharply talented players out there.
HDDVD didn't last even a month, BluRay didn't make it a few weeks. Amateurs. A month is nothing when we're talking about getting our hands on some high-value trade secrets--they're secret because they provide a competitive advantage. $100,000 isn't a year's income for a good business.
In RCT you don't build food courts because guests got lost; so I would build a 9x9 pave with an info booth in the center and make that my food court. Profits like crazy: my guests bought maps guaranteed, then never got lost. They also bought tons of food and drinks. That thing was a cash printing operation.
I'd charge them for my time.
Tyranny and Oppression HAVE come to this land in the guise of fighting both foreign and domestic pedophiles!
Verizon to purchase Netflix. Netflix to be renamed Shitflix. Customers to shit bricks. Verizon to be renamed Shitbrick.
Only on software engineers have the delusion that decompiling source == understanding source == reproducing functionality of that source.
He has "Algorithms" that are particularly interesting. Strips of code that do fun and interesting things. It's not hard to work that out. What's hard to work out is the entire codebase: the XUL interface processor, drawing on the screen, calling the TCP stack, menus and callbacks, back-end functionality (for example, a reflow mechanism in a Web browser). Small, self-contained pieces are simple: the parsing algorithm for a Web browser is going to be a bunch of code calling a bunch of other code you will quickly mark off and ignore. If you miss something, you'll have this stuff sketched out so you can come back to it.
All someone has to do is identify a part of the image processing algorithm by identifying a call into the operating system to get image data from an input device and following the flow path. Mark off the memory where the image is stored, watch things that access it. It's some legwork, but it's by no means impossible.
By the way, $60k-$120k/year is typical for people who just bust these things all fucking day. The people at Semantec, at McAfee, at F-Secure, at SI Government Solutions, they spend all day reverse engineering and mapping programs, breaking anti-debugging protections, breaking anti-disassembly protections, the works. They learn patterns, they learn to recognize pieces and to use strategies that become routine and mechanical. It's a lot like playing Go.
No God-like powers here. Nor for the people who cracked A/52 or any other encryption algo that sucked and was proprietary--a task that involves first isolating the algorithm (people do this in an afternoon) and second finding a mathematical flaw in it (this can take years or decades). People are always pulling proprietary algorithms out of binary code.
Isn't this the issue from a week or two ago where some senator stepped up to choke it off because he thought it would cause GPS interference, and 80% of the Slashdot comments were, "I don't get it, he's in the Healthcare Industry's deep pockets, why is he bothering himself with the communications industry?"
Your code is trivial to reverse engineer; binary code doesn't hide trade secrets. Look up the IDA Pro book on No Starch Press, then have at it on some code out there. One book. A month and a half. Learn to use the online debugger to bypass anti-debugging facilities (yes, I said that) and disassembly traps.
What you want is called a "patent."
2 years = 24 months. 24 x $20 = 240 x $2 = $480.
Well, T-Mobile charged me $90/mo for "Classic" on contract and $70/mo for "Value" without contract--same plan. The 2 year contract adds $480 to your phone service costs; I got a $320 phone for $50 plus $20 x 24 = $480, total $530 I paid for it. But I broke my contract for $50 eventually, dropped the required $30/mo Android service and got the $10/mo 2GB limited data service instead, saved myself $40 overall.
At least the phone insurance was viable. Asurion charged $7/mo and the copay for the phone was $160. For a Motorola V3 RAZR it was last $5/mo (might be $7 now) and the copay was $50; a brand new Motorola V3 Razr, at the time, cost $50--or free with 2 year contract that cost $480 over 2 years. Yes, that means you can pay $480 for a $50 phone AND pay $5/mo to have an insurance coverage for loss or damage with a $50 copay to get the $50 phone.
3) you don't practice what you preach (posting on Slashdot rather than feeding starving children); 4) spending other peoples' money isn't charity; and 5) ignoring that your example, the neighbor who had thrown away 30 odd boxes, had covered the cost of their wastage.
On point (3), I am advocating a non-cost solution--you don,t pay for the vegetable scraps you're throwing away.
On point (4), what spending of other peoples' money? Explain to me this. You spend $5 on vegetables, you generate vegetable scraps that go into landfill; or you spend $5 on vegetables, you generate vegetable scraps that go into compost. In the landfilling scenario, there is a cost of disposal and management to society, paid for in taxes; in the composting scenario, there is revenue generated from the composted product (sold to farmers), which pays for the cost of running the thing (and beyond). Same for recycling. If, however, people don't contribute enough--if they throw things into the trash instead of the recycling or compost bins--then you can't break the critical point to cover (and exceed) the initial costs. It seems to me that NOT recycling and NOT composting is spending other peoples' money.
On point (5), the neighbor had to cover the cost, yes. See, if the neighbor had donated that stuff, recycled stuff, and so on, then the neighbor would not have been--get this--assessed a punitive fine for not doing these things. The neighbor is not free to throw away her stuff like that; it is mandatory to retain her waste in her house and only put it out for trash pickup at a maximum flow rate, or to dispose of it in recycling or charitable donations. She has failed to follow the rules, and thus has been fined.
Many states have a "Bottle Bill" by which they collect empty containers. These states routinely generate more revenue from the effort than the cost of administrating it, and have less trash in the streets because trash is worth money; the revenue goes to other environmental efforts, usually, as sort of a thematic thing. Solon, Ohio, has a robust single stream recycling program and composting program that brings in a HUGE amount of revenue and has eliminated almost ALL landfill waste--compost is sold back to citizens at $2/bag ($1 to seniors). Solon also has a once-per-month collection of uncommon, difficult, and hazardous wastes such as car batteries, paint, carpet padding, oil, propane cylinders, and the like. Solon, Ohio is known to be one of the best places in the world to live.
You banter the word "freedom" like a mantra, but you seem to not understand what freedom is. You seem to want the freedom to harm society, and your arguments are ineffable--arguing that you shouldn't be burdened with putting something in a bin one foot to the right of another bin, yet also arguing that punishing someone for not doing exactly that is fine. You've maintained the same position while arguing both for and against it, with no coherent argument for. That indicates your position is wrong or that you are a mindless drone with no clue what you're arguing about.
Let's try targeting this one. You say "Spending other peoples' money isn't charity" and that you don't want to "force the citizens to sacrifice." What other peoples' money is being spent, and what sacrifice are citizens making? Explain. Remember the context: You are throwing an object into the TRASH, to be dragged away and destroyed, with no compensation to you; instead, we want you to put it in a pile next to the trash, so that we can also drag it away but give it to another person (in some form) rather than destroying it.
Awful lot of words for a strawman argument.
force the citizens to sacrifice to cover the rest of the need.
YOU are throwing something away. Those shoes? That shirt? You put them in the trash.
I am paying taxes for our government-run trash service to landfill things, and possibly to haul away your trash. The more trash you generate, the more this costs.
Now tell me: What sacrifice are you making putting those shoes in the trash bag marked "Charity" for Purple Heart or Salvation Army to take off your door step, rather than putting them in that other bag marked "Trash"? You know, the bag that's filled with all the crap that you'd otherwise throw out, using the same number of bags but instead filling them with a mixture of trash and reusable items?
It looks to me like you've set up a good range of strawmen and undistributed middles. You've argued about sacrifice--about the charity of giving away that which you would profit by keeping, your time or your money or your worldly goods--and about the imposition of sacrifice on people. And yet we are talking about food that you've decided to not eat, that you would throw in the trash, and instead there is a bin right next to the trash that you throw such things into for the city to come collect and handle. And the kick is that this ultimately benefits you: there is revenue generated by the city reselling this, and a cost reduction on the economy by the availability of a much cheaper good to fill a need--lower taxes and lower food costs to you. And yet you stack this up against the ideal of charity, of giving away your worldly possessions to your own disadvantage in order to better the lives of others.
And here's my non-strawman: You use the city's landfills and you use the city's collection services. If you dispose of excess trash, you can pay an excess fine to cover those costs so that I don't have to pay more in taxes, or you can take your trash to the landfill yourself--where you will be forced to sort it before dumping--and pay the fees to dump there, which are included in the city (or private, who charges additional fees for excess) trash collection taxes (or fees). If you don't wish to face THAT, you can find a way to dispose of such things yourself--as long as you don't create a problem for everyone else (toxic/smelly air, waste leak into the water table, lowering property values around your landfill back yard, animals, etc). I refuse to sacrifice for your stubborn, borderline malicious behavior.
You, sir, are a madman or a simple fool. I can only surmise--with the complete lack of actual physical sacrifice involved--that your vendetta against these kinds of societal waste management and reuse plans represents a fear of making an emotional sacrifice, that being that you feel the need to exert your ego and your control over those around you to show that you do not have to stand with your fellow man, and will indeed stand against him for no idealistic reason other than because you don't want to be told what to do--even when your actions negatively impact those around you. Buy a ruler and take up measuring your penis; it harms fewer people.
It's not about rights. You purport that the loss of an individual's private property is a loss to the individual alone. I purport that, when the individual seeks to dispose of a good, two options of equal cost (or value) to the individual appear: a disposal method that destroys the good and a disposal method that relinquishes it to another member of society.
When an initiative has an impact on a general sector of society--farmers, the poor, a self-selected social group (such as Apple cultists)--it has an impact on "Society" by shifting the general supply and demand. To some degree, an impact on even a single person impacts "Society" by changing how their money is spent--but very, very small impacts are effectively meaningless by the "give a man to fish" principle (the cobbler does not care about ONE pair of shoes ever; he cares slightly about ONE pair of shoes per year, as small as that is).
Thus if you release your private property that you intend to dispose of, "Society" in general avoids a cost (tax, etc.). If this becomes a general trend--composting of food waste you were going to landfill anyway--then a product can be made and distributed at reduced cost. In some cases, that reduced cost can become a targeted tax at a lower rate: if the government collects enough compostable material, it can resell that compost to farmers for a profit at a lower cost than manufactured fertilizers, which reduces the amount of tax the government must collect to bring the same revenue AND reduces the overall costs to farmers EVEN THOUGH the government is effectively making up the difference in reduced tax on everyone by taking that money entirely from the farmers. The farmer pays less in taxes AND on materials, people pay less in taxes, food costs go down, available wealth in society increases.
There are 5 senators, roughly half are Republican and half are Democrat. All are retarded.
In which case we develop a callous society that doesn't help anyone, and where momentary failure is punished by eternal damnation; or a society with too many entitlements--such as BASIC WELFARE AND UNEMPLOYMENT--which we all are made to pay, and which aren't aided by the taking of property which has been voluntarily released by its prior owner (because the prior owner preferred to release it to destruction).
So IF FOOD STAMPS EXIST, then your neighbor's destruction of their own property that they no longer want costs YOU money.
Right now I could accuse you of wanting to end welfare, unemployment, and all other social services--if you get fired, become homeless, can't get a job because you are a dirty bum, and nobody wants to help you because you live in a selfish community, then you should die. That argument is, however, illogical; instead I will accuse you of advocating a situation which demands either the elimination of welfare or an increase in financial burden on me because you feel like destroying something you no longer have a use for rather than releasing it as a supply to others who need such a thing.
You argue for the freedom to harm others through your worthless destruction. I believe we do found our important concepts of freedom--for example, your own argument--on the belief that one person's rights are bound by the impact on others' rights. You are now harming others' rights to life, or forcing a greater encroachment on their right to their own property (money, taken in taxes); destroying a perfectly serviceable pair of shoes that have become tattered and ugly leaves another person barefoot, or society paying to support said person by buying another pair of shoes--and to no gain for yourself except the satisfaction of inflicting your poor behavior onto others.
So what would you prefer? That others are left to go without their needs met, when the means to meet those needs are no longer useful to you and being thrown out? In that case, others are suffering because you have decided to destroy something of no value to you, but great value to them. You have profited exactly zero by this destruction, and would suffer exactly zero loss by placing it in a separate bag marked "Donation" (salvation army comes door to door in some places).
By your actions, to no advantage to yourself, you harm others; by other actions, to no additional workload on yourself, you could have helped others. While one person has refused to go hungry for a day so that another may eat a good meal for once, YOU have satisfied yourself and then POISONED the remaining food in the face of beggars pale and weak with hunger. You have diminished the wealth of society, and for that you owe it a debt.
Do not confuse the retention of your own means for your own ends with the destruction of means no longer useful to you but extremely valuable to others. A man has a right to his property, his money, his food, and his time, and serves himself at the expense of others always to some degree; but a man has no excuse to disservice others for no gain to himself and in the face of no inconvenience to help them. Such a man is a villain.
You are wrong, of course. Imagine that farmers pay good money for petroleum and mined mineral nutrients, which involve the labor of mining, processing (with whatever chemicals), maintaining machines, etc. They use this fertilizer to grow plants and other food. Said food is used and leaves waste which is composted--which involves the reduced labor of collecting, piling, occasionally turning.
This compost is cheaper to manufacture--requires less labor (chemicals that must be mined and made, machines that must be made from materials that must be mined, labor to remove things from the ground, etc.). The farmer now has access to an effective replacement for part of his ground nutrient needs, and no longer needs to spend as much money to grow food.
This means food is now cheaper to produce (which in theory means farmers should price war for an edge; in reality, that may happen BUT futures speculators will fuck up the market as we run it now). This frees up labor resources for making food, shifting the monetary costs into other economic areas. A net gain for society.
Economics does not happen in a bubble. Why do you think monopolies are bad for consumers?