If you use -Tw as I usually do, then yes, you get the warnings. The point is, however, that to PERL the two are equal, even though it knows an "undef" from an empty string. It's a feature.
C has no concept of NULL...
True, even though C programmers do. As you say, an uninitialized char pointer may have the value 0 or some other randomish number you can't anticipate. The value "NULL" is usually a macro for "(void * (0))"), if I can split a hair, but there's nothing special about that value to the language or a compiler; you may init some pointer to the value 45 and probably not get a warning.
empty strings. They also have a type and a length, NULL doesn't.
That's analogous to string variables in many programming languages. While PERL will (usually) be happy to tell you that a variable that contains an empty string and an uninitialized variable are equal, under C that will create an agregious, and sometimes elusive, bug.
$5k to use a trademark is peanuts for the people who have the money to abuse it
You've got it wrong. Whether you pay the money or not, you can't misuse the name. Microsoft can't put out a version of Windows called "MS Linux" without Linus' permission. If it's software, and not Linux, he can tell them not to use the term "Linux" with it. How much kernel code they have to use would be something of a question, but they'd run afoul of the GPL anyway.
Charging the nominal fee is just to fund the enforcement effort.
They're just protecting the name "Linux" from genuine abuse. Sending it to everyone with "Linux" on their web site is like the notice stamped into my crowbar that says, "WEAR EYE PROTECTION". It's just legal CYA. If they didn't do that, they could lose the trademark, which would be a disaster for Linux.
And sending email is the only cost-effective way to do it.
Even if they got copyright protection for their boxes somehow, his use of their product falls under "fair use": it's a different purpose than they used for their work, like making mobiles out of AOL CDs.
He should countersue for tortious interference or something.
I've also heard that leaving your windows open on the highway going moderate speeds (~60mph) is about the same as having your air conditioning running full blast, gas-wise.
Not true, or at least, not for most cars. The AC takes 2-4mpg, and having the windows all open takes off less than 1mpg, unless you go really fast. There's not that much drag.
Think of sticking your hand out the car window a few inches -- you can "fly" it, right? But you can't do that at all inside the car with the air coming through the open windows.
Put another way: the driver can feel when the AC is on, having to compensate with the accelerator. The driver doesn't notice the windows being down at all. What if only one side were open? You'd have to compensate with the steering.
He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License [...]. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.
Whoever wrote that doesn't appear to know what "copyrighted" means.
The GPL is "copyrighted", too. Software published under the GPL or IBM's license or Creative Commons or Microsoft's EULA* is copyrighted. Almost everything is copyrighted, except things which have been put or have at last fallen into the public domain.
The license you publish under just tells the user what they can do with your copyrighted work. It doesn't change the fact that it's still copyrighted.
You modify the bacteria to follow some stimulus that can be applied with higher resolution than can currently be achieved with traces (light, maybe?) and let them lay down wiring.
An etching process to guide the bacteria would have to shine a smaller beam than the trace, but not too small. That would be interesting research. Anyway, the wavelength would have to be (maybe) 30nm for current work, which is pushing into the x-ray band. I'm not sure the little critters would respond very well if the beam were too strong. I guess they'd need training:-)
The other side of that is, if you're shining x-rays onto the chip material, you may as well use that to do the etching.
... if we're willing to agree... to the logical conclusion that the world population growth must be controlled by force
We aren't willing to agree. You'll never get a majority of Americans - or anything other than a tiny, tiny minority, I suspect - to agree with your assessment.
The trouble with his thesis is that it assumes the whole world thinks as he does, or at least, the whole world thinks the same way. World politics is driven by regional influence. Within each region and nation there is potential for a wildly different response to solving the population problem.
Technology - I guess this means finding some kind of utopian answer that eliminates poverty, or makes having more kids unnecessary.
Economy - It's fine to say "only poor people overbreed, so let's make everyone rich". If we could do that, wouldn't we? We've tried, but there will always be poor, and they will always overbreed.
Education - though it never works, it's always tried.
Force - if economic and political conditions are right, the upper classes may be able to force the lower classes to stop breeding. This will inevitably lead to collapse, but so does everything.
War - historically, our favorite solution to regional overcrowding. Well, next to
Disease - if we get too densely populated, modern travel techology will assure the rapid spread of wonderful population-limited maladies.
... no significant portion of the population will ever move off-world. In fact, it'd be a complete waste of resources to even try.
I think that's the key point. The race may expand into space, but that will be by procreation of emigrants, not by moving significant numbers of people. The gravity ocean is too deep for the herd to ford.
Space exploration may be of sociological help to the population crunch, in the same way that the NFL and NASCAR relieve certain stresses, but I agree that it isn't an answer to population control.
In the US, if the police have a warrant to search your premises, you have to unlock anyplace they want unlocked, or face comtempt of court. Same with safe combinations. You don't have to tell them where the safe is, though!
I actually hope they get something analogous, but not "hand over the keys". They don't get to have the keys, they get to have you unlock everything they ask to see.
There's a difference.
The battle we're fighting is to keep the New World ("cyberspace") at least as free as the Old World (dirtspace). Terrorism is just the latest problem that the enemy (those who would expand government tyrrany in the name of order) can use against us.
We should allow some intrusion from the Old World into the New, lest they do something really stupid like outlaw crypto altogether.
As if a court order to hand over crypto keys means anything to a criminal, anyway. Would you rather hand over the keys and get yourself killed by your fellow terrorists/hoods/mafiosi (to whom you are loyal anyway), or refuse to hand them over and go to jail for contempt?
Really, it's like comparing a cookie-cutter 3BR ranch in a popular subdivision with renovating a Victorian downtown. With the first, you know what you'll get (except for what they don't tell you). With the other, you may have to think a little bit, but when all is said and done you have a better product.
You invented ethernet. Even before that, you were THERE, and helped operate, the first big ARPANet demo for Congress. You founded 3Com. You wrote more Inforworld columns than a mere human like me could read. You are the Old Master, Yoda in the swamp.
Don't spoil it now by being Dvorak. Please.
Linux is only Unix on the outside. There's scarcely little code on the inside from 1992. And I believe there is none (zero, nada) from before 1975. I know this because I've looked at the early UNIX code at http://tuhs.org/ and what little survives is not found in Linux.
Windows a copy of the Mac? In the sense that English is a copy of French, maybe [flames >/dev/null]. Some elements are the same, but how you do things with them is quite different.
Asking what the new OS will be is asking the wrong question. Ask instead what new class of devices will need an OS, and the answer would follow from that. I say "would" because I'm not sure even that question is relevant.
I think you're right about education being important.
I'll stop there. Ok, so I won't.
The ailment is called "hypochondria". A person who has it is called a "hypochondriac".
"Hypochondriacism" would be worship of hypochondriacs.
I'll assume that the other misspellings and such are the product of typographical errors. As for what I can infer is the point of your post, that bad medicine causes hypochondria, you're just wrong.
You can't cure hypochondria through education. A hypochondriac has a specific need to gain sympathy or attention by complaining about ailments. It has nothing to do with how the ailment is treated, except for getting attention from another person. Where that need comes from probably varies with the individual, but that's what the ailment is. "I hurt, help me". Sometimes it's a cry for help out of a real situation that has no other physical symptoms.
When I'm sick, and it's bad, I see a doctor. I don't go to the chiropractor, I don't activate the "prayer chain" at church, and I don't go in for copper bracelets or other such.
Bad medicine is bad for people, but so is a monopoly on medicine. The AMA/FDA/pharmacorp cartel wants their way to be the only way, and as a result senior citizens have to choose between their meds and their mortgage. Oh well, just go into the nursing home - Medicare will cover that at $50/day, but won't pay for someone to mow the yard (which might be the one thing forcing someone out of their home).
I'm not for having the government mow yards. I'm saying that a little competition is ok. The placebo effect is very strong, and you can't create it for someone as well as they can for themselves. If someone decides they'd rather go to a faith healer (i.e, 100% placebo), what's that to you? It's their life, let them live it.
The more advanced our medicine gets, the more like magic it looks, to paraphrase Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Which magic do you trust? Who benefits more by treating you - some bimbo selling candles online or a doctor who doesn't know your name but knows your insurance company?
That doctor who complains that his patients trust a web site more than they do him ought to invest in a pair of blue jeans and an '85 GMC Sierra Classic. Be seen in that, instead of your Armani suit and Lexus.
While some kind of "security" layer sounds nice, I'd like to know what you suggest, specifically. A popup box saying "this site is requesting permission to read file X"? User clicks ok, every time, and they quit looking at it after a while. Then you wrote this:
a HUGE security threat, possibly even worse than anything that's come out of IE.
You can always uninstall the extension (but you can't uninstall part of IE)
An extension only affects the portion of the installed base that uses it
The model is:
Put it out there
Wait till it breaks
Fix and repeat.
There's really no way an extension to a Firefox app could get the penetration that IE had. Maybe AdBlock could get to 95% of the Firefox base, so if Firefox had 95% of the market, it could have the kind of numbers IE had in its heyday. Those are a couple of really big ifs, so I don't think your "worse than anything that's come out of IE" is at all justified. I'm not trying to hide behind obscurity, but just saying that your hyperbole is misplaced.
How many IE users have been hit by spyware? 40%, 50%, something like that? Come on.
The Green Tennis Shoes Principle is (roughly) that the Internet brings makes it efficient to market niche products.
Zazzle looks to allow you to customize your selling experience. It's hoping to let folks like flea market vendors (and they are legion) sell their wares in a custom-looking environment. If it's easy enough, it shoud work really well.
Ebay, Yahoo!, AOL, et al will probably copy the idea.
If you catch someone in the act of doing harm to you or to someone else, don't wait. Act. Stop the harm being done, or being threatened.
It may be necessary, in the process of stopping the harm, to inflict harm on the attacker. Take care that your response isn't more harmful than that which had been threatened.
Failing to act in that circumstance is at best a reverse tragedy of the commons, in the general case laziness, and at worst is sheer cowardice.
After the fact it becomes mere revenge, which is a waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
There once was a hacker named Hans,
Who taught his B-trees how to dance.
When unlinking filenames,
Each inode proclaims,
Our FS pwns Bill girly man's!
If you use -Tw as I usually do, then yes, you get the warnings. The point is, however, that to PERL the two are equal, even though it knows an "undef" from an empty string. It's a feature.
C has no concept of NULL ...
True, even though C programmers do. As you say, an uninitialized char pointer may have the value 0 or some other randomish number you can't anticipate. The value "NULL" is usually a macro for "(void * (0))"), if I can split a hair, but there's nothing special about that value to the language or a compiler; you may init some pointer to the value 45 and probably not get a warning.
That's analogous to string variables in many programming languages. While PERL will (usually) be happy to tell you that a variable that contains an empty string and an uninitialized variable are equal, under C that will create an agregious, and sometimes elusive, bug.
Did they ask you what you ate, and what time of day?
Do you drink coffee, tea, or eat chocolate or other sugary or caffeinated foods?
Have you tried aerobic exercise, at various times of day?
Do you anage your blood sugar level.
If all else fails, try a serving or two of beer or wine before bedtime.
You've got it wrong. Whether you pay the money or not, you can't misuse the name. Microsoft can't put out a version of Windows called "MS Linux" without Linus' permission. If it's software, and not Linux, he can tell them not to use the term "Linux" with it. How much kernel code they have to use would be something of a question, but they'd run afoul of the GPL anyway.
Charging the nominal fee is just to fund the enforcement effort.
They're just protecting the name "Linux" from genuine abuse. Sending it to everyone with "Linux" on their web site is like the notice stamped into my crowbar that says, "WEAR EYE PROTECTION". It's just legal CYA. If they didn't do that, they could lose the trademark, which would be a disaster for Linux.
And sending email is the only cost-effective way to do it.
Even if they got copyright protection for their boxes somehow, his use of their product falls under "fair use": it's a different purpose than they used for their work, like making mobiles out of AOL CDs.
He should countersue for tortious interference or something.
I've also heard that leaving your windows open on the highway going moderate speeds (~60mph) is about the same as having your air conditioning running full blast, gas-wise.
Not true, or at least, not for most cars. The AC takes 2-4mpg, and having the windows all open takes off less than 1mpg, unless you go really fast. There's not that much drag.
Think of sticking your hand out the car window a few inches -- you can "fly" it, right? But you can't do that at all inside the car with the air coming through the open windows.
Put another way: the driver can feel when the AC is on, having to compensate with the accelerator. The driver doesn't notice the windows being down at all. What if only one side were open? You'd have to compensate with the steering.
Whoever wrote that doesn't appear to know what "copyrighted" means.
The GPL is "copyrighted", too. Software published under the GPL or IBM's license or Creative Commons or Microsoft's EULA* is copyrighted. Almost everything is copyrighted, except things which have been put or have at last fallen into the public domain.
The license you publish under just tells the user what they can do with your copyrighted work. It doesn't change the fact that it's still copyrighted.
* Really more of a contract than a license.An etching process to guide the bacteria would have to shine a smaller beam than the trace, but not too small. That would be interesting research. Anyway, the wavelength would have to be (maybe) 30nm for current work, which is pushing into the x-ray band. I'm not sure the little critters would respond very well if the beam were too strong. I guess they'd need training :-)
The other side of that is, if you're shining x-rays onto the chip material, you may as well use that to do the etching.
The trouble with his thesis is that it assumes the whole world thinks as he does, or at least, the whole world thinks the same way. World politics is driven by regional influence. Within each region and nation there is potential for a wildly different response to solving the population problem.
I think that's the key point. The race may expand into space, but that will be by procreation of emigrants, not by moving significant numbers of people. The gravity ocean is too deep for the herd to ford.
Space exploration may be of sociological help to the population crunch, in the same way that the NFL and NASCAR relieve certain stresses, but I agree that it isn't an answer to population control.
In the US, if the police have a warrant to search your premises, you have to unlock anyplace they want unlocked, or face comtempt of court. Same with safe combinations. You don't have to tell them where the safe is, though!
I actually hope they get something analogous, but not "hand over the keys". They don't get to have the keys, they get to have you unlock everything they ask to see.
There's a difference.
The battle we're fighting is to keep the New World ("cyberspace") at least as free as the Old World (dirtspace). Terrorism is just the latest problem that the enemy (those who would expand government tyrrany in the name of order) can use against us.
We should allow some intrusion from the Old World into the New, lest they do something really stupid like outlaw crypto altogether.
As if a court order to hand over crypto keys means anything to a criminal, anyway. Would you rather hand over the keys and get yourself killed by your fellow terrorists/hoods/mafiosi (to whom you are loyal anyway), or refuse to hand them over and go to jail for contempt?
their Spammish AIM position!
It appears that most people like that term, even though they think the article needs cleanup.
I think there's a special wing of Hades reserved just for SEOs, spammers, and other suitwankers.
It's more like comparing a car and a helicopter.
Really, it's like comparing a cookie-cutter 3BR ranch in a popular subdivision with renovating a Victorian downtown. With the first, you know what you'll get (except for what they don't tell you). With the other, you may have to think a little bit, but when all is said and done you have a better product.
You invented ethernet. Even before that, you were THERE, and helped operate, the first big ARPANet demo for Congress. You founded 3Com. You wrote more Inforworld columns than a mere human like me could read. You are the Old Master, Yoda in the swamp.
Don't spoil it now by being Dvorak. Please.
Linux is only Unix on the outside. There's scarcely little code on the inside from 1992. And I believe there is none (zero, nada) from before 1975. I know this because I've looked at the early UNIX code at http://tuhs.org/ and what little survives is not found in Linux.
Windows a copy of the Mac? In the sense that English is a copy of French, maybe [flames >/dev/null]. Some elements are the same, but how you do things with them is quite different.
Asking what the new OS will be is asking the wrong question. Ask instead what new class of devices will need an OS, and the answer would follow from that. I say "would" because I'm not sure even that question is relevant.
I think you're right about education being important.
I'll stop there. Ok, so I won't.
The ailment is called "hypochondria". A person who has it is called a "hypochondriac".
"Hypochondriacism" would be worship of hypochondriacs.
I'll assume that the other misspellings and such are the product of typographical errors. As for what I can infer is the point of your post, that bad medicine causes hypochondria, you're just wrong.
You can't cure hypochondria through education. A hypochondriac has a specific need to gain sympathy or attention by complaining about ailments. It has nothing to do with how the ailment is treated, except for getting attention from another person. Where that need comes from probably varies with the individual, but that's what the ailment is. "I hurt, help me". Sometimes it's a cry for help out of a real situation that has no other physical symptoms.
When I'm sick, and it's bad, I see a doctor. I don't go to the chiropractor, I don't activate the "prayer chain" at church, and I don't go in for copper bracelets or other such.
Bad medicine is bad for people, but so is a monopoly on medicine. The AMA/FDA/pharmacorp cartel wants their way to be the only way, and as a result senior citizens have to choose between their meds and their mortgage. Oh well, just go into the nursing home - Medicare will cover that at $50/day, but won't pay for someone to mow the yard (which might be the one thing forcing someone out of their home).
I'm not for having the government mow yards. I'm saying that a little competition is ok. The placebo effect is very strong, and you can't create it for someone as well as they can for themselves. If someone decides they'd rather go to a faith healer (i.e, 100% placebo), what's that to you? It's their life, let them live it.
The more advanced our medicine gets, the more like magic it looks, to paraphrase Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Which magic do you trust? Who benefits more by treating you - some bimbo selling candles online or a doctor who doesn't know your name but knows your insurance company?
That doctor who complains that his patients trust a web site more than they do him ought to invest in a pair of blue jeans and an '85 GMC Sierra Classic. Be seen in that, instead of your Armani suit and Lexus.
Best. Post. Ever.
>damage to a single system
Oh.
While some kind of "security" layer sounds nice, I'd like to know what you suggest, specifically. A popup box saying "this site is requesting permission to read file X"? User clicks ok, every time, and they quit looking at it after a while. Then you wrote this:
There's really no way an extension to a Firefox app could get the penetration that IE had. Maybe AdBlock could get to 95% of the Firefox base, so if Firefox had 95% of the market, it could have the kind of numbers IE had in its heyday. Those are a couple of really big ifs, so I don't think your "worse than anything that's come out of IE" is at all justified. I'm not trying to hide behind obscurity, but just saying that your hyperbole is misplaced.
How many IE users have been hit by spyware? 40%, 50%, something like that? Come on.
Yeah, I saw it. Didn't like it.
That principle is older than Batman Begins, though, or even Batman, and probably older than the written word.
The Green Tennis Shoes Principle is (roughly) that the Internet brings makes it efficient to market niche products.
Zazzle looks to allow you to customize your selling experience. It's hoping to let folks like flea market vendors (and they are legion) sell their wares in a custom-looking environment. If it's easy enough, it shoud work really well.
Ebay, Yahoo!, AOL, et al will probably copy the idea.
Ah, a Pepsico troll. I'm reporting you :-).
If you catch someone in the act of doing harm to you or to someone else, don't wait. Act. Stop the harm being done, or being threatened.
It may be necessary, in the process of stopping the harm, to inflict harm on the attacker. Take care that your response isn't more harmful than that which had been threatened.
Failing to act in that circumstance is at best a reverse tragedy of the commons, in the general case laziness, and at worst is sheer cowardice.
After the fact it becomes mere revenge, which is a waste of time.
You're right. Like much of what Darl says, it makes no sense.