Change a word (or two) and release a new edition to put a damper on used textbook sales. Students will love that. Probably so much that they would actually start to pirate your book...
Actually, there's no need to change even one word. Just re-order some chapters, re-number any numbered questions/exercises/etc., and change the font, margins, or paper size so that the page numbers don't line up even within each chapter. Instructors will refuse to deal with the headache of issuing two page/exercise/chapter numbers at each reference to the textbook.
Thomas Babington Macaulay's speech in the House of Commons, 5 February 1841 on the obscene extension of the term of copyright protections:
"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?
Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
So these laws finally went through, and the pirates are here. Surprise!
Consider voluntarily opting out of the over-zealous protections offered by current copyright law. For example, check out O'Reilly's Open Book project. Among their options are the Founders' Copyright, where works return to the public domain after 14 or 28 years (instead of the current lifetime + 70 years). Even better, given the technological revolution between then and now, consider even less restrictive licenses that would enable your customers to get even greater benefit out of your works.
Yes, this option requires that the public make some "nice distinctions" by recognizing that your works are (would be) more freely available than the typical work, and that they should correspondingly pirate them less. If you take this path, remember to proclaim your moral highground loudly and proudly, so that people notice. Also, encouraging your coworkers, fellow authors, publishers, etc., along the same lines and increasing the number of works so available will help the public to more often encounter and understand this issue, and again reduce the incentive to pirate your works.
Thomas Babington Macaulay's speech in the House of Commons, 5 February 1841
on the obscene extension of the term of copyright protections:
"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened
to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if
the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of
the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it
to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable
kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were
virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have
been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually
repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present, the holder of copyright
has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are
regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving
men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law,
and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good
repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions.
Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different
from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this
intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed
in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal
pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side, indeed,
should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as
popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be
in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of
the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who,
a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the
author when in great distress?
Remember, too, that, when once it ceases
to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property,
no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes
nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share
in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to
create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable
restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to
a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from
pillaging and defrauding the living."
Linux, otoh, doesn't need eject. Just umount the thing, and sync if you're paranoid.
Actually, eject is still useful in GNU/Linux.
It causes the device entry in/dev to go away.
It does send some kind of eject signal to the device. Most devices behave just fine if they're disconnected without receiving an eject, but some have issues. I have a Nikon camera that acts like a card reader for its own card when plugged in via USB. If I yank the plug without ejecting it gets confused, sometimes to the point that only taking the battery out and putting it back in restores the camera to normal working order.
Eject USB devices in GNU/Linux with the same old/usr/bin/eject command used for CD-ROM drives (internally, the ioctl is still named CDROMEJECT) (GUI users will probably have an 'eject' entry in a right-click menu somewhere).
Hello, the Internet. I would like to propose Godwin's Law for
Networks: In any discussion on network policy, such as net neutrality,
traffic shaping, quality of service, protocol-based filtering, etc.,
if you introduce a claim that involves child pornography, you lose the
argument.
The child pornography community will use whatever technology is
available for information transfer, just like the rest of us. Any policy
short of inspection of every document that passes through the network
and forbidding any opaque encoding (which includes forbidding anything
novel and forbidding all encryption), is irrelevant
to the issue of child pornography.
The child pornography issue is being used for its shock value.
It's as if "child pornography" is a magic phrase that is expected to
turn people's brains off and prevent them from critically examining the
surrounding proposal. We cannot allow this kind of irresponsible
irrational advocacy to dominate our public discussion.
Fight sound bites with sound bites: "Godwin's Law for Networks".
Consider separate policies for techs and non-techs
on
Remote Access Policies
·
· Score: 1
At my previous workplace, initially, we didn't have an official remote access policy. Development and IT just ssh'd in as necessary to keep the company running. Development and IT were 90% GNU/Linux. Then, one day, the Finance department (100% Microsoft) decided that remote acces would be neat. The talked to legal and presumably to some software vendor, and suddenly we had a remote access policy that mandated the use of a specific, proprietary, expensive, underpowered Microsoft-Windows-only VPN application. Dev/IT's complaints fell on deaf ears (this, arguably, was the real problem here) -- we were In Violation of the Official Policy, so obviously we were in the wrong. We continued to violate the policy to keep the company running as necessary.
There was probably some value in providing a hand-holding, easy-for-the-user remote access option. Other comments have suggested providing company laptops already set up and ready to go. Whatever you choose, please don't tie the hands of your technical people. You will make their jobs harder, reduce their productivity, and drive them out of your company.
I don't trust congress to be able to define copyleft correctly. RMS agonizes over whether the FSF has done it correctly, and his heart is in it. Boiling this task down to a yea/nay vote for 535 people who have so many other issues they're supposed to be up-to-date on that many decisions go to whichever party can purchase more of the congressperson's ear time sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Page 26 makes a big deal about processes not having hard drive access. Yet, in the diagram on page 38, Google Gears get access to "write files to your hard drive or read files from sensitive areas like your documents or desktop."
So make a new top-level domain (.fair ,.bal , whatever), and let websites opt-in to imposing a Fairness Doctrine on themselves by registering names in that domain. Failure to respond to alleged violations of the voluntary opt-in fairness mandates eventually lead to losing your registration.
This way, people who prefer to get their information from organizations working under these constraints can do so without imposing draconian restrictions on the rest of the web. There's enough room for everybody.
If your employer is still enamored with the idea of filing documents with the patent office, suggest a Statutory Invention Registration. This will confer the positive aspects of patents -- protecting you from being sued over use of the "invention" and adding the invention to the public record -- without the negative aspects of patents -- stifling the industry or putting the company in the position where it is fiscally obligated to bring suit to 'protect its assets', and thereby run up expensive legal fees and create a public relations nightmare. Also, the filing fees for a SIR are cheaper than a normal patent application.
Public Service Announcement: Habit-Forming Technologies
It has come to the attention of this institution that certain technologies
and innovations developed over the course of human history may, in
retrospect, be habit-forming and could lead to addiction. Citizens are
encouraged to exercise caution and restraint in their use of the following
list of technologies and are further encouraged to be vigilant for the
sake of their friends and family members, lest they become too deeply
involved in these potentially dangerous activities.
Help is available. If you or a loved one, friend, or acquaintance
finds himself or herself excessively attached to one or more of these
technologies, contact your local branch office of the Ministry of
Progress immediately.
List of recognized potentially habit-forming technologies:
'Weight' is an abstraction used in NN simulations.
In biology, the strength of interaction between two neurons is determined primarily by the number of synapses between them -- how many of Neuron B's dendrites lie on Neuron A's axon. This is exactly the information contained in the wiring diagram.
Of course, half the fun of any advancement is learning all the new things that are *not* explained or turned out to be more complicated than previously thought. With good wiring diagrams, we can make predictions about what kind of firing patterns we expect to see based on various assumptions about synapse behavior, etc., and in this way learn about other brain mechanisms.
Slashdot Mirror
#define min(X,Y) ((X) < (Y) ? (X) : (Y))
Just be careful with your side effects.
(gcc-3 had a side-effect safe <? min operator, though it has since been removed.)
Or the server that it would receive that amount of text from you?
Actually, yes.
Change a word (or two) and release a new edition to put a damper on used textbook sales. Students will love that. Probably so much that they would actually start to pirate your book...
Actually, there's no need to change even one word. Just re-order some chapters, re-number any numbered questions/exercises/etc., and change the font, margins, or paper size so that the page numbers don't line up even within each chapter. Instructors will refuse to deal with the headache of issuing two page/exercise/chapter numbers at each reference to the textbook.
Maybe the value of your book to most people isn't above free?
Then why are they willing to break the law to get it?
Breaking the law is also free?
"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?
Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
So these laws finally went through, and the pirates are here. Surprise!
Consider voluntarily opting out of the over-zealous protections offered by current copyright law. For example, check out O'Reilly's Open Book project. Among their options are the Founders' Copyright, where works return to the public domain after 14 or 28 years (instead of the current lifetime + 70 years). Even better, given the technological revolution between then and now, consider even less restrictive licenses that would enable your customers to get even greater benefit out of your works.
Yes, this option requires that the public make some "nice distinctions" by recognizing that your works are (would be) more freely available than the typical work, and that they should correspondingly pirate them less. If you take this path, remember to proclaim your moral highground loudly and proudly, so that people notice. Also, encouraging your coworkers, fellow authors, publishers, etc., along the same lines and increasing the number of works so available will help the public to more often encounter and understand this issue, and again reduce the incentive to pirate your works.
Welcome to the Anarres library, Mrs. Le Guin.
Thomas Babington Macaulay's speech in the House of Commons, 5 February 1841 on the obscene extension of the term of copyright protections:
"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?
Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
What you're looking for is called blinding.
Linux, otoh, doesn't need eject. Just umount the thing, and sync if you're paranoid.
Actually, eject is still useful in GNU/Linux.
Eject USB devices in GNU/Linux with the same old /usr/bin/eject command used for CD-ROM drives (internally, the ioctl is still named CDROMEJECT) (GUI users will probably have an 'eject' entry in a right-click menu somewhere).
Hello, the Internet. I would like to propose Godwin's Law for Networks: In any discussion on network policy, such as net neutrality, traffic shaping, quality of service, protocol-based filtering, etc., if you introduce a claim that involves child pornography, you lose the argument.
The child pornography community will use whatever technology is available for information transfer, just like the rest of us. Any policy short of inspection of every document that passes through the network and forbidding any opaque encoding (which includes forbidding anything novel and forbidding all encryption), is irrelevant to the issue of child pornography.
The child pornography issue is being used for its shock value. It's as if "child pornography" is a magic phrase that is expected to turn people's brains off and prevent them from critically examining the surrounding proposal. We cannot allow this kind of irresponsible irrational advocacy to dominate our public discussion.
Fight sound bites with sound bites: "Godwin's Law for Networks".
Globulation
At my previous workplace, initially, we didn't have an official remote access policy. Development and IT just ssh'd in as necessary to keep the company running. Development and IT were 90% GNU/Linux. Then, one day, the Finance department (100% Microsoft) decided that remote acces would be neat. The talked to legal and presumably to some software vendor, and suddenly we had a remote access policy that mandated the use of a specific, proprietary, expensive, underpowered Microsoft-Windows-only VPN application. Dev/IT's complaints fell on deaf ears (this, arguably, was the real problem here) -- we were In Violation of the Official Policy, so obviously we were in the wrong. We continued to violate the policy to keep the company running as necessary.
There was probably some value in providing a hand-holding, easy-for-the-user remote access option. Other comments have suggested providing company laptops already set up and ready to go. Whatever you choose, please don't tie the hands of your technical people. You will make their jobs harder, reduce their productivity, and drive them out of your company.
I don't trust congress to be able to define copyleft correctly. RMS agonizes over whether the FSF has done it correctly, and his heart is in it. Boiling this task down to a yea/nay vote for 535 people who have so many other issues they're supposed to be up-to-date on that many decisions go to whichever party can purchase more of the congressperson's ear time sounds like a recipe for disaster.
ROLLBACK;
When the subversion server is down, work stops.
When the git server is down, work continues.
No. Transformers are mostly iron. Iron is heavy -- 7.87 g/cm^3. 30 tons of iron is only 3.5 m^3 (think of a cube 1.5 meters in each direction).
Page 26 makes a big deal about processes not having hard drive access. Yet, in the diagram on page 38, Google Gears get access to "write files to your hard drive or read files from sensitive areas like your documents or desktop."
So make a new top-level domain (.fair , .bal , whatever), and let websites opt-in to imposing a Fairness Doctrine on themselves by registering names in that domain. Failure to respond to alleged violations of the voluntary opt-in fairness mandates eventually lead to losing your registration.
This way, people who prefer to get their information from organizations working under these constraints can do so without imposing draconian restrictions on the rest of the web. There's enough room for everybody.
There's no need to clutter up source code with logging statements for debugging. Just trace appropriate functions as needed.
If your employer is still enamored with the idea of filing documents with the patent office, suggest a Statutory Invention Registration. This will confer the positive aspects of patents -- protecting you from being sued over use of the "invention" and adding the invention to the public record -- without the negative aspects of patents -- stifling the industry or putting the company in the position where it is fiscally obligated to bring suit to 'protect its assets', and thereby run up expensive legal fees and create a public relations nightmare. Also, the filing fees for a SIR are cheaper than a normal patent application.
The next one will obviously feature light-trains instead of light-cycles and will be set in a Spanish-speaking locale.
Non-Microsoft-Windows users
1) generally don't have malware problems, and
2) can't run PCPitstop's malware.
Public Service Announcement: Habit-Forming Technologies
It has come to the attention of this institution that certain technologies and innovations developed over the course of human history may, in retrospect, be habit-forming and could lead to addiction. Citizens are encouraged to exercise caution and restraint in their use of the following list of technologies and are further encouraged to be vigilant for the sake of their friends and family members, lest they become too deeply involved in these potentially dangerous activities.
Help is available. If you or a loved one, friend, or acquaintance finds himself or herself excessively attached to one or more of these technologies, contact your local branch office of the Ministry of Progress immediately.
List of recognized potentially habit-forming technologies:
'Weight' is an abstraction used in NN simulations.
In biology, the strength of interaction between two neurons is determined primarily by the number of synapses between them -- how many of Neuron B's dendrites lie on Neuron A's axon. This is exactly the information contained in the wiring diagram.
Of course, half the fun of any advancement is learning all the new things that are *not* explained or turned out to be more complicated than previously thought. With good wiring diagrams, we can make predictions about what kind of firing patterns we expect to see based on various assumptions about synapse behavior, etc., and in this way learn about other brain mechanisms.
See Competing On The Basis Of Speed for some ideas on how to cut down that 4-5 week figure, and other advantages you get as the overhead comes down.