Glad I don't have children like the ones you describe.
If I wanted something ridiculous like a cell phone or a PlayStation when I was a child, I could be expected to mow lawns for a summer (or a year). In fact, of all the money my parents spent on us as children, their priorities were clearly on our education.
With my parent's experience as a model, I've made wise decisions with my life and my money, and I anticipate being able to retire early (optimistically at 42).
It is my intention to raise my children in the same manner.
If an IT worker is at risk of having his children starve to death, I think he should consider changing to a new field. Like farming for instance. It would also give him some time to think.
I want my children to respect me because they will understand that I valued their future far more than I valued my beliefs and morals.
People who sacrifice their morals are pitied, not respected. I'd prefer that my children respect me for showing strength in the face of adversity. My wife certainly does. Nothing worse than to be pitied by one's own children.
How many volkswagons to a Philadelphia anyway? Or do we only use Volkswagons if it enters the earth's atmosphere? This is so confusing. I can't help but think that metric would be useful here.
If the impossible happens, at least one of your assumptions is wrong. If the highly improbable happens, one or more of your assumptions may be wrong.
Winning 10 times out of 200 tickets on "a million to one" probability would in fact lead any competent diagnostician to conclude that the probability is not in fact one in a million but closer to 1 in 20. The flaw is assuming that the probability is one in a million.
Finally, two fatal accidents in the shuttle program may not be a sufficiently large sample to make generalizations from, but the likelihood that the probability of failure is "a million to one" is itself not probable.
The X-15 didn't launch from a runway. Rutan's ship doesn't consume half its wet mass getting to launch altitude. The issue of fuel consumption reaching 40,000 feet is only problematic for single-stage-to-orbit and multi-stages with rocket powered lift-off.
Oddly enough, insurance companies don't always cover CD's. When my car was broken into, they replaced everything that was stolen, including an expensive HP calculator, but they would not cover the CD's.
You make a reasonable point in that the key itself is simply a number. That brings us to the second point. Does the MPAA have the right to prevent its secret number from being publicly distributed? That above all else, I believe, is the real question. Is this any different than posting someone's bank account number with instructions for anonymously raiding the account? I think there are ample reasons why this is not the case.
1. The number is available in all DVD hardware and software. It is not secret, merely difficult to obtain.
2. Without the number, DVD owners cannot view their lawfully purchased DVD. Access to this number is implicit with the purchase of the DVD. Otherwise, they have not purchased a copy of the movie, they have purchased a piece of plastic.
3. When technology moves on and the last DVD player dies, all these pieces of plastic will be worthless, useless, and their contents lost, without this key. It stands to reason that the public good requires that custody of the key belongs with the DVD owners, not the MPAA.
4. At its root, copyright is a social contract between the public and the content creator. This right is limited solely to replication of content, not its use. As CSS has no capacity to limit replication, and substantially impedes use, it is my opinion that the MPAA has violated the social contract. To remedy these damages, the MPAA must relinquish all rights to the CSS key.
Code is a language. It has grammar. It has syntax. It has nuance. It has multitudes of dialects. Most importantly, it has meaning. It is most emphatically Speech in every sense of the word.
The fact that a machine can process and execute it is entirely orthogonal.
Not convinced? The Supreme Court ruled that the symbolic notation for music was Speech. Just because the language does not translate efficiently into audible words does not disqualify it from First Amendment protection.
Would you like to explain how a musician playing sheet music differs from a computer executing code? A phonograph playing a record?
Sheet music is copyrightable, so is code. How exactly does one copyright something if it's not Speech?
Assuming both john@foo.com and john@bar.com are different people, and for whatever reason, both of their mail is stored locally, you can use the virtusertable in conjunction with the aliases file.
Your local users would therefore be john_foo_mail and john_bar_mail. Substitute their login id's as appropriate. The nice feature here is that if they move to another system, you can edit the aliases file to forward their mail as necessary.
I've never had to deal with mail for people who did not have actual login accounts on some machine, so for large installations, I'm definitely not an authority, but for the six or seven domains and thirty odd email accounts that I host, this works fine.
This is just the next phase of Microsoft's "decommoditization" of basic internet services. Pay attention kids.
1. Embrace. Microsoft provides Outlook Express to connect to "commodity" internet services like POP and IMAP accounts. OE is the default mail client for Internet Explorer and quickly becomes the preferred application for many ISP's POP accounts since no additional software is needed.
1. Extend. Microsoft buys Hotmail email accounts, provides web-based interface, and launchs proprietary authentication system called Passport.
2. Extinguish. Microsoft discontinues Outlook Express, leaving ISP's in the lurch, and paves the way for a proprietary, web-services based solution.
Want to connect to Yahoo mail? Not with Microsoft's mail program. Want to connect to your ISP's mail? What? You need a separate application for that? Why can't I just click the mail icon? Of course, that takes me to Microsoft's mail system.
The big question is whether Microsoft is premature in step three. I think not.
The various letter Q's? There aren't really various letter Q's.
The author of the page was stating that there are multiple code points for the letter Q. This is true. The ascii Q exists. There is also a full-width Q in the east asian code pages. An application can use either code, and both will hopefully render a Q. In theory, a lexical comparison should treat these characters as being equivalent. In actual practice, this is unlikely to ever be the case.
This is not really a problem. Algorithms that use indexes into text should only be used with fixed-width chars. Unless you're implementing a word-processor it is unlikely that you would ever need to do this. Pointer-based algorithms, which include cursors and iterators, can do the same work.
UTF-8 is in some ways a compressed format of the 32 bit Unicode space. Any algorithms that operate on compressed data directly are going to be more complex.
I should mention that applications that are not properly globalized cannot expect to operate on user-readable text at a glyph level. At best you'll be able to deal with ascii delimited sequences of foreign characters. UTF-8 makes this minimal state of affairs possible with little, if any, code revision.
United States citizens cannot launch outside of the United States without FAA approval according to the AST panel at the Space Access conference in Arizona this past April. For suborbital flights, this seems excessive; for orbital flights, I'm not surprised in the least.
The FAA has threatened fines and possibly jail for anyone who violates that order. Whether that will hold up in court is a whole different story.
Seems to me that a private company incorporated in an equatorial third-world country would be better situated than any company in the U.S. I don't see why U.S. citizens cannot own a stake in a foreign enterprise of this type.
Actually, the real problems are all three: government corruption, the undermining of democracy, and unjust laws. When you think of an effective solution that doesn't envolve getting a lot of people killed, let us know. In the meantime, we'll fight the obvious stuff. Imagine how hard it will be fighting corruption and restoring democracy when you have no privacy.
You are either ignoring the obvious solutions or using the wrong programming language.
It is generally understood that certain changes to a C++ base class will invalidate derived classes. This is not a side-effect; it's a given. Asking for this to be fixed is like asking that nails be provided with threads and a slot on top for easy removal. If you need to use a screw, use a screw.
The parent post overlooks the fact that GC is penalized repeatedly while malloc/free incurs a one-time hit. O(N_dead) vs. O(N_live) is not the correct model.
Each allocation must be returned to the heap whether using malloc/free or GC. That's a fact of life. Moreover, in any OOP language, (C++, C#, or Java) you may also have deconstructors or finalization to worry about. Memory deallocation should be discounted as baseline as none of these languages offers any advantage over the other in terms of speed.
This still leaves GC with the recurring overhead of tracking live objects.
No matter how many allocations have been previously freed, malloc/free-based languages do not have to repeatedly iterate through them, invalidating the parent poster's argument that the ratio of live/dead objects will ever tip the balance in favor of GC.
A master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices. ``The Tao is embodied in all software - regardless of how insignificant,'' said the master.
``Is the Tao in a hand-held calculator?'' asked the novice.
``It is,'' came the reply.
``Is the Tao in a video game?'' continued the novice.
``It is even in a video game,'' said the master.
``And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?''
The master coughed and shifted his position slightly. ``The lesson is over for today,'' he said.
I use gimp often, and feel that I can comment on many of the things that are missing or broken. Here's two.
1. 16 bit color is critical for professional work. film gimp has it, regular gimp does not. After running a sequence of filters, you frequently wind up with 7 or fewer bits of precision, and it shows. For webpage graphics, 8 bits is fine since it's usually palletized anyway.
2. I find the path tool on gimp to be a miserable experience. Most of my cursing results from lack of undo support, inability to have multiple paths displayed simultaneously, gross difficulty in editing, adding, or removing points, splicing paths, joining paths, opening and closing paths, etc... It's just not fully functional. Adobe Photoshop and Corel's Photopaint both implement reasonable bezier path tools.
Gimp is very powerful, and I get a lot out of it. But it has the appeal of a lawnmower with a four-cylinder engine and no handle.
Copyright law is not about your home and your terms. Its about the copyright hodlers terms.
Incorrect. The copyright holder's terms only apply when copies are made.
And: what about the first sentence in every comment against a "censor" post on/. ?
Censorship is having content removed or denied to me without my consent. Paying someone to clean up films that I own is not censorship.
Free speach! Why do you dare to restrict the free speach of the copyright holder and stand up about free speach when a NAZI web site is censored?
The copyright holder had his free speech. I don't have to listen to him. And if I want to hear what he has to say, I have the right to ignore any and all parts that I disagree with. If the copyright holders were prevented from releasing their work, that would be censorship.
For the record, I don't care what's on the DVD, porn and vulgar language don't bother me at all, and I would never pay for a modified film. But I'll be damned if someone can dictate how, when, and where I can watch a film that I purchased. No such right exists.
Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose. Your right to Free Speech ends at my property and that includes my possessions.
The fact of the matter is that the job of being a parent has become harder. Children are growing up faster because they are exposed to more of the adult world at any earlier age. Latch-key children have been the norm for several decades now with both parents working to make ends meet. It's a serious problem.
When the topic of blocking online content comes up, whether it is web-based or mail-based, solicited or not, what I am hearing is the frustration of parents reacting to the simultaneous pressure of having to meet all their responsibilities while having no resources or margin of relief. Again, this is a serious problem.
The internet is a very powerful medium -- many physical constraints are vanished, including distances, handicap, and language. We need more tools for selecting and filtering content, more services for finding appropriate content, more defenses against unwanted solicitation and inappropriate content. Communities need the tools to build their online equivalents. At this time, SMTP-based mail is not it, and I have my doubts whether HTTP-based web content is whole picture either.
It is nice to dream... There are solutions out there, and I have several ideas of my own. But it takes time and energy. The world-wide-web was not built in a day. Its successors will be no less work.
All of what you have said is true. It would be good if the population took responsibility for improving the human condition. There are a number of reasons why this is not happening, none of which I'll go into because it's a different, difficult issue altogether, but assuming that a group of concerned citizens accomplished all that and more, there is still one glaring problem.
There is no one single society, either globally or locally, and while the community to which this thread alludes may have well-defined boundaries in the real-world, today at least, any boundary in the online world is nebulous at best. I fully believe that this will change in the future, but it won't be through passing laws with real-world geographic jurisdictions.
Certain communities need active defense from spammers and pornographers, and I expect that ISP's will perform this role or find themselves without customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad I don't have children like the ones you describe.
If I wanted something ridiculous like a cell phone or a PlayStation when I was a child, I could be expected to mow lawns for a summer (or a year). In fact, of all the money my parents spent on us as children, their priorities were clearly on our education.
With my parent's experience as a model, I've made wise decisions with my life and my money, and I anticipate being able to retire early (optimistically at 42).
It is my intention to raise my children in the same manner.
-Hope
If an IT worker is at risk of having his children starve to death, I think he should consider changing to a new field. Like farming for instance. It would also give him some time to think.
-Hope
-Hope
How many volkswagons to a Philadelphia anyway? Or do we only use Volkswagons if it enters the earth's atmosphere? This is so confusing. I can't help but think that metric would be useful here.
-Hope
If the impossible happens, at least one of your assumptions is wrong. If the highly improbable happens, one or more of your assumptions may be wrong.
Winning 10 times out of 200 tickets on "a million to one" probability would in fact lead any competent diagnostician to conclude that the probability is not in fact one in a million but closer to 1 in 20. The flaw is assuming that the probability is one in a million.
Finally, two fatal accidents in the shuttle program may not be a sufficiently large sample to make generalizations from, but the likelihood that the probability of failure is "a million to one" is itself not probable.
-Hope
The X-15 didn't launch from a runway. Rutan's ship doesn't consume half its wet mass getting to launch altitude. The issue of fuel consumption reaching 40,000 feet is only problematic for single-stage-to-orbit and multi-stages with rocket powered lift-off.
-Hope
Oddly enough, insurance companies don't always cover CD's. When my car was broken into, they replaced everything that was stolen, including an expensive HP calculator, but they would not cover the CD's.
Curious world.
-Hope
Extremely well put. It need not even be considered satirical; it's simply accurate. Bravo! -Hope
You make a reasonable point in that the key itself is simply a number. That brings us to the second point. Does the MPAA have the right to prevent its secret number from being publicly distributed? That above all else, I believe, is the real question. Is this any different than posting someone's bank account number with instructions for anonymously raiding the account? I think there are ample reasons why this is not the case.
1. The number is available in all DVD hardware and software. It is not secret, merely difficult to obtain.
2. Without the number, DVD owners cannot view their lawfully purchased DVD. Access to this number is implicit with the purchase of the DVD. Otherwise, they have not purchased a copy of the movie, they have purchased a piece of plastic.
3. When technology moves on and the last DVD player dies, all these pieces of plastic will be worthless, useless, and their contents lost, without this key. It stands to reason that the public good requires that custody of the key belongs with the DVD owners, not the MPAA.
4. At its root, copyright is a social contract between the public and the content creator. This right is limited solely to replication of content, not its use. As CSS has no capacity to limit replication, and substantially impedes use, it is my opinion that the MPAA has violated the social contract. To remedy these damages, the MPAA must relinquish all rights to the CSS key.
-Hope
Code is a language. It has grammar. It has syntax. It has nuance. It has multitudes of dialects. Most importantly, it has meaning. It is most emphatically Speech in every sense of the word.
The fact that a machine can process and execute it is entirely orthogonal.
Not convinced? The Supreme Court ruled that the symbolic notation for music was Speech. Just because the language does not translate efficiently into audible words does not disqualify it from First Amendment protection.
Would you like to explain how a musician playing sheet music differs from a computer executing code? A phonograph playing a record?
Sheet music is copyrightable, so is code. How exactly does one copyright something if it's not Speech?
-Hope
Assuming both john@foo.com and john@bar.com are different people, and for whatever reason, both of their mail is stored locally, you can use the virtusertable in conjunction with the aliases file.
/etc/mail/virtusertable:
/etc/aliases:
john@foo.com john-foo
john@bar.com john-bar
john-foo: john_foo_mail
john-bar: john_bar_mail
Your local users would therefore be john_foo_mail and john_bar_mail. Substitute their login id's as appropriate. The nice feature here is that if they move to another system, you can edit the aliases file to forward their mail as necessary.
I've never had to deal with mail for people who did not have actual login accounts on some machine, so for large installations, I'm definitely not an authority, but for the six or seven domains and thirty odd email accounts that I host, this works fine.
Good luck!
-Hope
How about "Note to self: don't pick up the soap."
[ ] e) After taking possession, it became your car anyway; he owes you a new car.
-Hope
This is just the next phase of Microsoft's "decommoditization" of basic internet services. Pay attention kids.
1. Embrace. Microsoft provides Outlook Express to connect to "commodity" internet services like POP and IMAP accounts. OE is the default mail client for Internet Explorer and quickly becomes the preferred application for many ISP's POP accounts since no additional software is needed.
1. Extend. Microsoft buys Hotmail email accounts, provides web-based interface, and launchs proprietary authentication system called Passport.
2. Extinguish. Microsoft discontinues Outlook Express, leaving ISP's in the lurch, and paves the way for a proprietary, web-services based solution.
Want to connect to Yahoo mail? Not with Microsoft's mail program. Want to connect to your ISP's mail? What? You need a separate application for that? Why can't I just click the mail icon? Of course, that takes me to Microsoft's mail system.
The big question is whether Microsoft is premature in step three. I think not.
-Hope
The various letter Q's? There aren't really various letter Q's.
The author of the page was stating that there are multiple code points for the letter Q. This is true. The ascii Q exists. There is also a full-width Q in the east asian code pages. An application can use either code, and both will hopefully render a Q. In theory, a lexical comparison should treat these characters as being equivalent. In actual practice, this is unlikely to ever be the case.
-Hope
This is not really a problem. Algorithms that use indexes into text should only be used with fixed-width chars. Unless you're implementing a word-processor it is unlikely that you would ever need to do this. Pointer-based algorithms, which include cursors and iterators, can do the same work.
UTF-8 is in some ways a compressed format of the 32 bit Unicode space. Any algorithms that operate on compressed data directly are going to be more complex.
I should mention that applications that are not properly globalized cannot expect to operate on user-readable text at a glyph level. At best you'll be able to deal with ascii delimited sequences of foreign characters. UTF-8 makes this minimal state of affairs possible with little, if any, code revision.
-Hope
United States citizens cannot launch outside of the United States without FAA approval according to the AST panel at the Space Access conference in Arizona this past April. For suborbital flights, this seems excessive; for orbital flights, I'm not surprised in the least.
The FAA has threatened fines and possibly jail for anyone who violates that order. Whether that will hold up in court is a whole different story.
Seems to me that a private company incorporated in an equatorial third-world country would be better situated than any company in the U.S. I don't see why U.S. citizens cannot own a stake in a foreign enterprise of this type.
-Hope
Actually, the real problems are all three: government corruption, the undermining of democracy, and unjust laws. When you think of an effective solution that doesn't envolve getting a lot of people killed, let us know. In the meantime, we'll fight the obvious stuff. Imagine how hard it will be fighting corruption and restoring democracy when you have no privacy.
-Hope
You are either ignoring the obvious solutions or using the wrong programming language.
It is generally understood that certain changes to a C++ base class will invalidate derived classes. This is not a side-effect; it's a given. Asking for this to be fixed is like asking that nails be provided with threads and a slot on top for easy removal. If you need to use a screw, use a screw.
-Hope
The parent post overlooks the fact that GC is penalized repeatedly while malloc/free incurs a one-time hit. O(N_dead) vs. O(N_live) is not the correct model.
Each allocation must be returned to the heap whether using malloc/free or GC. That's a fact of life. Moreover, in any OOP language, (C++, C#, or Java) you may also have deconstructors or finalization to worry about. Memory deallocation should be discounted as baseline as none of these languages offers any advantage over the other in terms of speed.
This still leaves GC with the recurring overhead of tracking live objects.
No matter how many allocations have been previously freed, malloc/free-based languages do not have to repeatedly iterate through them, invalidating the parent poster's argument that the ratio of live/dead objects will ever tip the balance in favor of GC.
-Hope
-Hope
I use gimp often, and feel that I can comment on many of the things that are missing or broken. Here's two.
1. 16 bit color is critical for professional work. film gimp has it, regular gimp does not. After running a sequence of filters, you frequently wind up with 7 or fewer bits of precision, and it shows. For webpage graphics, 8 bits is fine since it's usually palletized anyway.
2. I find the path tool on gimp to be a miserable experience. Most of my cursing results from lack of undo support, inability to have multiple paths displayed simultaneously, gross difficulty in editing, adding, or removing points, splicing paths, joining paths, opening and closing paths, etc... It's just not fully functional. Adobe Photoshop and Corel's Photopaint both implement reasonable bezier path tools.
Gimp is very powerful, and I get a lot out of it. But it has the appeal of a lawnmower with a four-cylinder engine and no handle.
-Hope
Copyright law is not about your home and your terms. Its about the copyright hodlers terms.
/. ?
Incorrect. The copyright holder's terms only apply when copies are made.
And: what about the first sentence in every comment against a "censor" post on
Censorship is having content removed or denied to me without my consent. Paying someone to clean up films that I own is not censorship.
Free speach! Why do you dare to restrict the free speach of the copyright holder and stand up about free speach when a NAZI web site is censored?
The copyright holder had his free speech. I don't have to listen to him. And if I want to hear what he has to say, I have the right to ignore any and all parts that I disagree with. If the copyright holders were prevented from releasing their work, that would be censorship.
For the record, I don't care what's on the DVD, porn and vulgar language don't bother me at all, and I would never pay for a modified film. But I'll be damned if someone can dictate how, when, and where I can watch a film that I purchased. No such right exists.
Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose. Your right to Free Speech ends at my property and that includes my possessions.
-Hope
The fact of the matter is that the job of being a parent has become harder. Children are growing up faster because they are exposed to more of the adult world at any earlier age. Latch-key children have been the norm for several decades now with both parents working to make ends meet. It's a serious problem.
When the topic of blocking online content comes up, whether it is web-based or mail-based, solicited or not, what I am hearing is the frustration of parents reacting to the simultaneous pressure of having to meet all their responsibilities while having no resources or margin of relief. Again, this is a serious problem.
The internet is a very powerful medium -- many physical constraints are vanished, including distances, handicap, and language. We need more tools for selecting and filtering content, more services for finding appropriate content, more defenses against unwanted solicitation and inappropriate content. Communities need the tools to build their online equivalents. At this time, SMTP-based mail is not it, and I have my doubts whether HTTP-based web content is whole picture either.
It is nice to dream... There are solutions out there, and I have several ideas of my own. But it takes time and energy. The world-wide-web was not built in a day. Its successors will be no less work.
-Hope
All of what you have said is true. It would be good if the population took responsibility for improving the human condition. There are a number of reasons why this is not happening, none of which I'll go into because it's a different, difficult issue altogether, but assuming that a group of concerned citizens accomplished all that and more, there is still one glaring problem.
There is no one single society, either globally or locally, and while the community to which this thread alludes may have well-defined boundaries in the real-world, today at least, any boundary in the online world is nebulous at best. I fully believe that this will change in the future, but it won't be through passing laws with real-world geographic jurisdictions.
Certain communities need active defense from spammers and pornographers, and I expect that ISP's will perform this role or find themselves without customers.
-Hope