How exactly are guns supposed to help kids whose access to the Internet has become even more restricted? I can think of only one way, and generally we try do discourage that.
How about we just put all minors in solitary confinement and carefully screen the guards? Then nobody could molest them, and parents wouldn't need to do a damn thing! And nobody's rights are violated, because minors aren't real people! Remember, it's not censorship if it's being done to someone else.
You might want to check out RingCycle, a research project at my university. It probably won't end up portable beyond x86, but it provides protection against buggy drivers, with no changes (other than a recompile) necessary to those drivers, and only minimal performance impact.
Actually, in a capitalist society, preferring an underdog is a beneficial quality. It's generally beneficial to have many players in any market, but barriers to entry and economies of scale tend to push markets towards oligopolies. By supporting underdogs, customers can counteract this.
Actually, why should copyrights outlive the death of the creator anyway? Their purpose is to promote the creation of more writings, obviously this doesn't work if the creator is gone. Why should creators be the only people allowed to make money (at the expense of the public) after they're dead?
The counter-argument is, "It's property, so who is the government to take it away?" Don't waste your time convincing me of that, I don't buy it. Those who call copyrights property rights are doing so to shift the discussion away from "How long should they last?" and towards "Why are you taking away my property?". It's a word game intended to derail honest discussion about how strong copyrights should be. (Hint: the Constitution has something to say on this matter. It says "limited times," and it doesn't mention securing the Right to the great-grandchildren of Authors.)
We could make a system of high-pressure nozzles and perfume injectors which emits rainbows and pine-scented goodness while dissipating waste heat from nuclear power generation.
Yes, because minors almost never figure out that they could just click the button anyway. We could make the system even more airtight by requiring people to type their birthdate; nobody could possibly figure out how to subtract a number greater than 18 from the current year.
Gah, this whole thing is so stupid. Nobody really accidentally finds porn, and those who do should get over it. Most kids who see porn were looking for it. Dogbert said it best: "So, you're pitting your intelligence against the collective sex drive of all the teenagers who own computers? Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell?"
Most of the time someone tries to keep people on their network from viewing objectionable content, somebody screams censorship, and somebody else pounces on him, saying that it's not censorship unless the government is doing it. But libraries and schools get a lot of funding from state governments. Heck, in my state it's mandatory for schools to contract to some company to tell kids what they can and can't see (not just porn, but some political sites, gaming, email, and occaisionally Wikipedia). I think it is actually, honest-to-goodness censoring. For some people, if you can't get it on the library computer, you can't get it period.
A mess, possibly, but also an interesting idea for an MMORPG. Or maybe we could just cast aside our corrupt political system and decide national policy that way. (Only half joking - the success of guilds would be correlated to their size and how much their members care, so aside from the bias in favor of gamers and computer owners, it would be very democratic.)
Out of curiosity, could you elaborate on "performance at rated speed"? From my consumer perspective, at any given speed it either works perfectly or doesn't. If clock speed and timings are fixed, what other variables contribute to performance (or whatever the tolerance is in)?
That's like asking if we expect drivers to know whether the posted speed limits are minimums or maximums. They damn well should know. Not saying they do...
It's probably been at least 10 years since anyone used a delay loop to time audio samples. For one, PCs got the ability to run multiple programs, so it stopped being acceptable to waste CPU time like that. Two, CPUs got too fast and unpredictable. (QBasic's Nibbles, if anyone remembers, uses a delay loop, and on a modern system you have to modify it or you get division by zero when it divides by the elapsed time.) Certainly if you're doing something more complex than a tight loop, you can't rely on how long an instruction will take, because it varies between CPUs that are logically the same. The data goes to a buffer in the sound card and is serialized by a clock on the sound card. The sound card interrupts when it's ready for more data. In general, most timekeeping is done via interrupts.
I do think that the rewarding somebody for releasing a process or method instead of keeping it a trade secret is a large part of the reason patents should exist in some fields. But this reasoning is completely inapplicable to the field of business methods, because it is practically impossible to execute a business method secretly. If NetFlix thought they could make money doing what they do, they would have started to do it regardless of whether they could patent it. And if they couldn't patent it, the certainly couldn't have kept it secret.
They didn't move away from it, they just started selling it at a higher price. You can now buy a WRT54GL (which runs Linux and is identical to v4.0) for about $10 more than a WRT54G (which is now v5.0, runs VxWorks, and has less RAM). Also, while I admit this is anecdotal, I've read that the VxWorks model is less stable.
I do play by the rules, and when I'm doing embedded work I don't choose to give away the entire farm by incorporating GPL'd code in my product.
The GPL does not require you to give away your hardware, just whatever portion of your software was derived from GPL works. How is that the "entire farm"? I hate it when companies can't decide whether they're selling hardware or software.
Why would more RAM make DVD ripping or burning faster? The limiting factors would be CPU speed and memory bandwidth for re-encoding, and the drive itself for ripping and burning. Also, he should look into getting a hacked firmware for his drive, which can drastically improve the read speed on encrypted DVDs (which is artifically limited).
DRM is not a necessary evil, and all record companies are currently selling media without it (CDs). In fact, DRM is probably the reason online music sales are as low as they are, because currently the best legal way to get music on your computer is buying and ripping CDs. Current online music services with DRM do provide instant gratification, but they offer the customer far less value.
I'm not a religious person, but I have faith in humanity, the general intelligence and goodness of the human species. However, statements as illogical as 'this book is true because it says so,' written by someone who presumably honestly believes that argument, shakes my faith utterly.
Did you ever consider there might be a reason we measure sound in decibels? We perceive sound roughly logarithmically, so even though a 6 decibel increase is a lot more power, it doesn't sound that much louder.
It's unfair to say Stallman is trying to tell people something that isn't his is. He's just a stickler for precise thought, and doesn't like the (admittedly fuzzy, but convenient) practice of calling the Linux kernel, plus a bunch of stuff from GNU, (and the X people, and the KDE or Gnome projects, and tons of other groups), only "Linux."
As for the GPL, it seems to me to be not much more than fixing loopholes. Back in the day, all computers were general-purpose, and there was not much concept of "firmware." Now, most peripherals can run software, and our computers are about to become far less general-purpose.
It used to be, if you modify my software to run on some other system, just giving me your modifications is useful to me, because naturally the system could also run software that I modify still further. Now, with the advent of 'appliances' running firmware, and with the threat of computers refusing to run, or to communicate with others running, unsigned code, that assumption no longer holds.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly are guns supposed to help kids whose access to the Internet has become even more restricted? I can think of only one way, and generally we try do discourage that.
OK, which party is the one wholly against censorship in any form? ...
How about we just put all minors in solitary confinement and carefully screen the guards? Then nobody could molest them, and parents wouldn't need to do a damn thing! And nobody's rights are violated, because minors aren't real people! Remember, it's not censorship if it's being done to someone else.
You might want to check out RingCycle, a research project at my university. It probably won't end up portable beyond x86, but it provides protection against buggy drivers, with no changes (other than a recompile) necessary to those drivers, and only minimal performance impact.
I doubt your dream car could be charged without rewiring most houses: ((((350 miles) / (30 mpg)) * (29 (megajoules / litre))) / (5 minutes)) / (240 volts) = 17 787.9304 amperes
Actually, in a capitalist society, preferring an underdog is a beneficial quality. It's generally beneficial to have many players in any market, but barriers to entry and economies of scale tend to push markets towards oligopolies. By supporting underdogs, customers can counteract this.
The counter-argument is, "It's property, so who is the government to take it away?" Don't waste your time convincing me of that, I don't buy it. Those who call copyrights property rights are doing so to shift the discussion away from "How long should they last?" and towards "Why are you taking away my property?". It's a word game intended to derail honest discussion about how strong copyrights should be. (Hint: the Constitution has something to say on this matter. It says "limited times," and it doesn't mention securing the Right to the great-grandchildren of Authors.)
We could make a system of high-pressure nozzles and perfume injectors which emits rainbows and pine-scented goodness while dissipating waste heat from nuclear power generation.
Gah, this whole thing is so stupid. Nobody really accidentally finds porn, and those who do should get over it. Most kids who see porn were looking for it. Dogbert said it best: "So, you're pitting your intelligence against the collective sex drive of all the teenagers who own computers? Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell?"
Most of the time someone tries to keep people on their network from viewing objectionable content, somebody screams censorship, and somebody else pounces on him, saying that it's not censorship unless the government is doing it. But libraries and schools get a lot of funding from state governments. Heck, in my state it's mandatory for schools to contract to some company to tell kids what they can and can't see (not just porn, but some political sites, gaming, email, and occaisionally Wikipedia). I think it is actually, honest-to-goodness censoring. For some people, if you can't get it on the library computer, you can't get it period.
A mess, possibly, but also an interesting idea for an MMORPG. Or maybe we could just cast aside our corrupt political system and decide national policy that way. (Only half joking - the success of guilds would be correlated to their size and how much their members care, so aside from the bias in favor of gamers and computer owners, it would be very democratic.)
Out of curiosity, could you elaborate on "performance at rated speed"? From my consumer perspective, at any given speed it either works perfectly or doesn't. If clock speed and timings are fixed, what other variables contribute to performance (or whatever the tolerance is in)?
That's like asking if we expect drivers to know whether the posted speed limits are minimums or maximums. They damn well should know. Not saying they do...
It's probably been at least 10 years since anyone used a delay loop to time audio samples. For one, PCs got the ability to run multiple programs, so it stopped being acceptable to waste CPU time like that. Two, CPUs got too fast and unpredictable. (QBasic's Nibbles, if anyone remembers, uses a delay loop, and on a modern system you have to modify it or you get division by zero when it divides by the elapsed time.) Certainly if you're doing something more complex than a tight loop, you can't rely on how long an instruction will take, because it varies between CPUs that are logically the same. The data goes to a buffer in the sound card and is serialized by a clock on the sound card. The sound card interrupts when it's ready for more data. In general, most timekeeping is done via interrupts.
Slashdot is one of those few places where saying something is "patented" doesn't make it sound cooler.
I seem to recall studying finite automata in a math course. Are you saying we can patent math?
I do think that the rewarding somebody for releasing a process or method instead of keeping it a trade secret is a large part of the reason patents should exist in some fields. But this reasoning is completely inapplicable to the field of business methods, because it is practically impossible to execute a business method secretly. If NetFlix thought they could make money doing what they do, they would have started to do it regardless of whether they could patent it. And if they couldn't patent it, the certainly couldn't have kept it secret.
They didn't move away from it, they just started selling it at a higher price. You can now buy a WRT54GL (which runs Linux and is identical to v4.0) for about $10 more than a WRT54G (which is now v5.0, runs VxWorks, and has less RAM). Also, while I admit this is anecdotal, I've read that the VxWorks model is less stable.
The GPL does not require you to give away your hardware, just whatever portion of your software was derived from GPL works. How is that the "entire farm"? I hate it when companies can't decide whether they're selling hardware or software.
Why would more RAM make DVD ripping or burning faster? The limiting factors would be CPU speed and memory bandwidth for re-encoding, and the drive itself for ripping and burning. Also, he should look into getting a hacked firmware for his drive, which can drastically improve the read speed on encrypted DVDs (which is artifically limited).
DRM is not a necessary evil, and all record companies are currently selling media without it (CDs). In fact, DRM is probably the reason online music sales are as low as they are, because currently the best legal way to get music on your computer is buying and ripping CDs. Current online music services with DRM do provide instant gratification, but they offer the customer far less value.
I'm not a religious person, but I have faith in humanity, the general intelligence and goodness of the human species. However, statements as illogical as 'this book is true because it says so,' written by someone who presumably honestly believes that argument, shakes my faith utterly.
Uh, duh - Freedom is Slavery, didn't you get the memo?
Did you ever consider there might be a reason we measure sound in decibels? We perceive sound roughly logarithmically, so even though a 6 decibel increase is a lot more power, it doesn't sound that much louder.
As for the GPL, it seems to me to be not much more than fixing loopholes. Back in the day, all computers were general-purpose, and there was not much concept of "firmware." Now, most peripherals can run software, and our computers are about to become far less general-purpose.
It used to be, if you modify my software to run on some other system, just giving me your modifications is useful to me, because naturally the system could also run software that I modify still further. Now, with the advent of 'appliances' running firmware, and with the threat of computers refusing to run, or to communicate with others running, unsigned code, that assumption no longer holds.