Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....
1,830 years
to process that amount of water.
And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.
Your calculation is about 3 orders of magnitude too high:
Some people think they know what spaghetti code is, but unless they've written code with line numbers, they probably don't.
And the good old days of 'LET A = NOT PI' to save three bytes of RAM:).
(ex-Sinclair BASIC programmers will understand why such arcane constructs were beneficial when you were low on RAM)
For those who never used Sinclair BASIC, I'll tell you why this is so: the BASIC interpreter converted the BASIC code that you typed into the machine into a smaller bytecode. Most tokens would boil down to a single byte, and all (most?) numbers are converted to floating-point values. In this case, "NOT PI" takes (I'm guessing) 2 bytes, whereas the floating-point number "0" takes (I'm guessing again) 5 bytes. Both expressions are equal to 0, though the "NOT PI" form would take a bit longer to execute than a literal 0.
Note: I've never actually programmed for the Sinclair, but the BASIC interpreters for a lot of machines of the era worked like this. I used Commodore BASIC for years, so I know it's true of that interpreter. Then again, a lot of those old machines used Microsoft BASIC interpreters, so this should be expected.
GPL covers SOURCE CODE, and thru "derivative works" covers binary "performances". The whole reason we even have EULA's (End User LICENSE Agreements) is that there was one case 30 years ago where somebody argued that typing source code from a book to RAM and from the RAM to CPU was "infringement" and duplication of the work. So because of the internal machine copies needed, you have to be granted a special LICENSE to USE any kind of software (source code or binary). EULA writers have used US law's reliance on "contracts" to throw the "kitchen sink" in EULAs and call them "contracts" rather than license for use.
Except that under Copyright Law, you don't need any special license to USE software. See Section 117, which was amended in 1980:
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. — Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner
Wire up a USB connector and write a driver to support it under Mac OSX, Linux and Windows.
While it's not for the Atari tablet (and also not USB), a couple of years ago I made an adapter for my Commodore KoalaPad to connect it to the PC joystick port: http://unixplumber.livejournal.com/14324.html
By the way, I wonder if there's a way to use a joystick as a core pointer in X... I guess it's Google time!
Personally, I think blue LEDs are generally the sign of an INFERIOR designer. Too many things nowadays have bright flashing blue LEDs for no other apparent reason other than "look! we have bright blue LEDs now!"
Hear, hear!
I would like to avoid buying any electronics that have blue LED's, but too many things have them these days that it kind of reduces the number of other options. My Sansa media player (a Christmas gift) has a blue scroll wheel, but I disabled it in software (thank you, Rockbox!). I also have some hand-me-down computer speakers, one of which has a bright blue LED power indicator, so I opened it up and put some opaque tape over the LED; now the power indicator still lights up but not as brightly. If I were more ambitious I would unsolder the blue LED and replace it with a good ol' red or green LED.
If you modify a GPL app and never read the LICENSE file then you're still breaching an implicit contractual agreement if you then released it as public domain or another license.
No, this would not be a breach of any contract, implicit or not, because the GPL is a copyright license. It would be a simple case of copyright infringement, clear and simple. If you don't have a license (aka permission) to redistribute the software, you are infringing the copyright. The only way not to infringe the copyright is to follow the license. There have even been court judgments to the same effect in cases where some developer distributed GPL'd software under a different (and proprietary) license.
In Apple's case, you aren't allowed to copy the OS from disc to computer
Not so. Read USC 17, Section 117:
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.â" Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
The first condition states that the copyright owner cannot restrict you from making copies of their software if this is an essential step in using the software (eg, copying from CD to hard disk and then from hard disk to RAM).
The second condition is also important but for a different reason (the right to make an archival copy).
First of all, the GNU GPL applies only if you redistribute the software. Otherwise without the license it's copyright infringement. Even without the license, you still have the right to use the software. That does not require permission from the copyright owner.
Second, when you get a loan from a bank, you make an agreement (a contract) that you will pay it back. Similarly, when you pay for a subscription (rental) music service, you have to agree to terms of service (also a contract), which almost invariably say that you agree not to keep the content after it expires. This differs from your situation because your downloaders (from what I can tell) did not have to agree to anything when they downloaded your content. A warning that ripping the stream wouldn't do any good does not count as a contract. Therefore you have no right to enforce an agreement upon them, so to speak, after the fact. They still have the right to use the content you gave them.
It's also stretching the definition of open source slightly when you need $100 of tools to compile the source, but no more than the early Free Software tools that required a commercial C compiler, or software written for Windows needing MSVC++ (before they released the free version).
Remember: open source has nothing to do with price, so "$100 of tools to compile the source" is irrelevant. That the tools required to compile the source are proprietary also does not affect the ability for you to open source your code (though it's still not good for open source developers, but for different reasons).
However, the fact that their SDK license explicitly states that no part of their secret API may be revealed to anyone else kind of means that you cannot expose any code that you write that uses their API's (which is technically necessary if you want to write an app that actually does something). Of course, this is based on reading an article explaining how the license hinders open source software and not actually reading the license itself.
I think the economic term you're looking for is "elasticity". Music sales are highly elastic because a slight change in price results in a sharp change in quantity demanded or supplied (the supply of music is nearly infinite; after all, it's just data).
Basically, installing and running a program are allowed without permission from the copyright owner. This means you don't need to accept an EULA to install the program.
According to the C standard, returning 0 from main is an acceptable way to indicate success. The EXIT_SUCCESS macro exists mainly to complement the EXIT_FAILURE macro (whose exact value depends on the host environment).
Then this stuff about how IP addresses are broken up into "classes" to ease routing.. err, no, they aren't.. though they used to be many, many years ago.
Actually, it does say "IP addresses are traditionally broken into several distinct classes, which were used to manage routing tables in the early years of the Internet".
Besides that, you are correct about this article being junk.
Just put "kona.kontera.com" in your/etc/hosts file with a black-hole IP address (e.g., 0.0.0.0). I do this for over 55000 hosts that are known for spyware, ads, and other nasties, so I see hardly any ads on the web anymore.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....
1,830 years
to process that amount of water.
And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.
Your calculation is about 3 orders of magnitude too high:
(17000 square miles * 10 feet) / (100000 * 200 gallons per minute) = 3.37035066 years
But taking into account how much is far below 10 feet deep (as you mentioned), it would take quite a long time.
Some people think they know what spaghetti code is, but unless they've written code with line numbers, they probably don't.
And the good old days of 'LET A = NOT PI' to save three bytes of RAM :).
(ex-Sinclair BASIC programmers will understand why such arcane constructs were beneficial when you were low on RAM)
For those who never used Sinclair BASIC, I'll tell you why this is so: the BASIC interpreter converted the BASIC code that you typed into the machine into a smaller bytecode. Most tokens would boil down to a single byte, and all (most?) numbers are converted to floating-point values. In this case, "NOT PI" takes (I'm guessing) 2 bytes, whereas the floating-point number "0" takes (I'm guessing again) 5 bytes. Both expressions are equal to 0, though the "NOT PI" form would take a bit longer to execute than a literal 0.
Note: I've never actually programmed for the Sinclair, but the BASIC interpreters for a lot of machines of the era worked like this. I used Commodore BASIC for years, so I know it's true of that interpreter. Then again, a lot of those old machines used Microsoft BASIC interpreters, so this should be expected.
No, no. A good sturdy screwdriver can bang stuff into a wall. Try turning a screw with a hammer.
That's easy! Use the "claw" end of a claw hammer. (Granted, this works ok for flat-head screws, but not so well for Philips screws)
GPL covers SOURCE CODE, and thru "derivative works" covers binary "performances". The whole reason we even have EULA's (End User LICENSE Agreements) is that there was one case 30 years ago where somebody argued that typing source code from a book to RAM and from the RAM to CPU was "infringement" and duplication of the work. So because of the internal machine copies needed, you have to be granted a special LICENSE to USE any kind of software (source code or binary). EULA writers have used US law's reliance on "contracts" to throw the "kitchen sink" in EULAs and call them "contracts" rather than license for use.
Except that under Copyright Law, you don't need any special license to USE software. See Section 117, which was amended in 1980:
Source: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117
I believe that the Copyright Act preempts your statements. :)
Wire up a USB connector and write a driver to support it under Mac OSX, Linux and Windows.
While it's not for the Atari tablet (and also not USB), a couple of years ago I made an adapter for my Commodore KoalaPad to connect it to the PC joystick port: http://unixplumber.livejournal.com/14324.html
By the way, I wonder if there's a way to use a joystick as a core pointer in X... I guess it's Google time!
That is all well in theory until your DNS gets hijacked too and "www.myopenid.com" points to the phishing site instead.
Then again, this problem exists with every other authentication method too. It is not limited to OpenID.
Personally, I think blue LEDs are generally the sign of an INFERIOR designer. Too many things nowadays have bright flashing blue LEDs for no other apparent reason other than "look! we have bright blue LEDs now!"
Hear, hear!
I would like to avoid buying any electronics that have blue LED's, but too many things have them these days that it kind of reduces the number of other options. My Sansa media player (a Christmas gift) has a blue scroll wheel, but I disabled it in software (thank you, Rockbox!). I also have some hand-me-down computer speakers, one of which has a bright blue LED power indicator, so I opened it up and put some opaque tape over the LED; now the power indicator still lights up but not as brightly. If I were more ambitious I would unsolder the blue LED and replace it with a good ol' red or green LED.
If you modify a GPL app and never read the LICENSE file then you're still breaching an implicit contractual agreement if you then released it as public domain or another license.
No, this would not be a breach of any contract, implicit or not, because the GPL is a copyright license. It would be a simple case of copyright infringement, clear and simple. If you don't have a license (aka permission) to redistribute the software, you are infringing the copyright. The only way not to infringe the copyright is to follow the license. There have even been court judgments to the same effect in cases where some developer distributed GPL'd software under a different (and proprietary) license.
In Apple's case, you aren't allowed to copy the OS from disc to computer
Not so. Read USC 17, Section 117:
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.â" Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
The first condition states that the copyright owner cannot restrict you from making copies of their software if this is an essential step in using the software (eg, copying from CD to hard disk and then from hard disk to RAM).
The second condition is also important but for a different reason (the right to make an archival copy).
You must be new here.
I don't know if I should mod that funny.
Don't worry, you don't even have that option anymore!
First of all, the GNU GPL applies only if you redistribute the software. Otherwise without the license it's copyright infringement. Even without the license, you still have the right to use the software. That does not require permission from the copyright owner.
Second, when you get a loan from a bank, you make an agreement (a contract) that you will pay it back. Similarly, when you pay for a subscription (rental) music service, you have to agree to terms of service (also a contract), which almost invariably say that you agree not to keep the content after it expires. This differs from your situation because your downloaders (from what I can tell) did not have to agree to anything when they downloaded your content. A warning that ripping the stream wouldn't do any good does not count as a contract. Therefore you have no right to enforce an agreement upon them, so to speak, after the fact. They still have the right to use the content you gave them.
It's also stretching the definition of open source slightly when you need $100 of tools to compile the source, but no more than the early Free Software tools that required a commercial C compiler, or software written for Windows needing MSVC++ (before they released the free version).
Remember: open source has nothing to do with price, so "$100 of tools to compile the source" is irrelevant. That the tools required to compile the source are proprietary also does not affect the ability for you to open source your code (though it's still not good for open source developers, but for different reasons).
However, the fact that their SDK license explicitly states that no part of their secret API may be revealed to anyone else kind of means that you cannot expose any code that you write that uses their API's (which is technically necessary if you want to write an app that actually does something). Of course, this is based on reading an article explaining how the license hinders open source software and not actually reading the license itself.
That combination is better than just free as in beer... it's also free as in free speech! Subversion, Ant, and CruiseControl are all Free Software.
I think the economic term you're looking for is "elasticity". Music sales are highly elastic because a slight change in price results in a sharp change in quantity demanded or supplied (the supply of music is nearly infinite; after all, it's just data).
"Congress has long recognized that it is necessary to make incidental copies of digital works in order to use them on computers."
. html
See http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise20
Basically, installing and running a program are allowed without permission from the copyright owner. This means you don't need to accept an EULA to install the program.
If I had mod points, I would mod that either funny or insightful, or both if that were an option.
Wouldn't a "killall -9 X" be easier?
According to the C standard, returning 0 from main is an acceptable way to indicate success. The EXIT_SUCCESS macro exists mainly to complement the EXIT_FAILURE macro (whose exact value depends on the host environment).
Look at the permissions of your /tmp directory. It ought to have the sticky bit set, which doesn't allow just anyone to remove everyone's files.
Besides that, you are correct about this article being junk.
Just put "kona.kontera.com" in your /etc/hosts file with a black-hole IP address (e.g., 0.0.0.0). I do this for over 55000 hosts that are known for spyware, ads, and other nasties, so I see hardly any ads on the web anymore. :)
Couldn't you just make a symlink from /dev/mouse to /dev/mouse0? Or just move it back to /dev/mouse?
That's not a bad uptime!
Since when did the patent system follow common sense? ;)
I fully expect Microsoft to be granted this patent, however contrary to common sense it is.
It wasn't a question at all. :)