Let's suppose I work for a big company with paranoid lawyers and a stock of patents. I use some "GPLv2 or later" code at work and contribute to it and my company distributes it. That's ok, but GPLv3 comes along and the lawyers don't like the clause about patents. But that doesn't matter because the users can opt to license under GPLv3 and thus demand a patent license. Or maybe not, but after users start opting to use GPLv3, my company's IP rights have been diluted in a way that neither my company nor I would have agreed to. You could say we've been forced to do something we don't want to.
We're forced to open any code we link to GPL code too, so if someone plagiarised some GPL code and used it in some application which uses closed source code we licensed under an NDA from someone else, we have to break either the NDA or the GPL, even if the company as such didn't know about or agree to the plagiarism. We could be forced to open the source code to the stuff we bought a binary license for from a third party because some intern was lazy and dishonest.
Saying no one is forced just shows you don't understand how the commercial software world works. Companies have patents on things they invented, and the license patents from competitors. And they license non GPL binary code from third parties and have no right to distribute the source code, or even access to it. If any employee starts to use GPL code, the company can end up in a situation where it simply can't comply with the GPL without getting sued. Compared to that, DRM like AACS seems quite benign - it's just companies trying to protect their intellectual property from pirates. The GPL is trying to abolish private property.
No that's not what I meant at all. I said both RMS and the AACS-LA try to force people to behave in a particular way, and that's the reason I like seeing them fail, and predicted that you'd try to weasel your way out of a comparison between the two, since you no doubt worship one and hate the other.
And sure enough you said "but RMS doesn't force people to use GPL code" and I pointed out that the AACS-LA doesn't force people to use their movies. Both parties do try to restrict people's behaviour if they do use "their" stuff though, and I've made it completley clear I like seeing them fail. Actually one important difference is that the AACS-LA is acting on the orders of the studios who actually own the music. If the studios don't like their behaviour they presumably have ways to influence it. But programmers dumb enough to contribute code to GPL projects that and leave in the disingenous "users may choose version 2 or a later version" may find that RMS writes later versions that users may opt for and those versions give those users rights over the programmer's employer's patents that the employer is not happy with.
And quite frankly, that's the reason I want to see RMS fall flat on his smug face. AACS getting cracked doesn't really affect me, since I don't plan on buying HDDVD or Blue Ray.
And the people who want to crack AACS could just not copy movies protected by it and only watch the originals on a supported OS. The AACS is not forcing anybody to do anything.
Well no. But RMS and the AACS-LA are both much more obnoxious than civillians in 1940s London. Plus it's not like they get killed, just thwarted in their schemes to force people to behave in some way.
Now I know that you're going to SAY how RMS is forcing Tivo to respect users' rights to modify their set top boxes and it's different from the AACS-LA. But that's subjective. I'm sure the AACS-LA think that their protecting the studio's rights too.
It means that you can't assume that they execute in any particularly thread context.
Actually, the post is a joke - I got the idea from the excellently geeky Undocumented Dos. There's a wonderful, and unintentionally funny story. Dos, being a single tasking OS has a single structure containing the current working directory for each drive and some flags called the CDS. The guys that wrote the book figured out that network redirectors work by setting some flags in the structure and providing a table of functions. Dos then calls out to them. They didn't work at Microsoft or have access to any source code and the whole scheme is undocumented (and the details depend on Dos version) but they successfully reverse engineered it and wrote a filesystem that works. In the first edition of the book, they decided to test in the then new Windows 3.0 by loading their filesystem in one Windows command.com prompt and seeing if the drive letters showed up in another one which they don't. They said that one of the technical reviewers of the first edition commented that 'only an idiot would expect that to work'.
And you can almost see what the reviewer means - since the different Windows command prompts can have different current working directories, they must have local copies of of CDS. In the second edition, they reverse engineered how this works. 16 bit Windows (as in Windows not based on the NT kernel) loads on top of Dos but installs another OS under Dos called the VMM - the Virtual Machine Manager, and that allows 32 bit ring 0 device drivers called VxDs to hook and intercept Dos memory and IO access so that the machine can run multiple Virtual Machines. So each Dos box is a separate VM and each VM gets its own copy of the CDS, thanks do a "Dos manager" VxD that knows enough about Dos internals to instance everything that needs to be instanced.
So this guys definition of an idiot was someone who doesn't play with command prompts for a few seconds on Windows and deduce that the undocumented CDS structure must be per VM instanced and hence that file system redirectors would be local to one Dos box. I find that definition funny, because it would mean that all but a tiny handful of the people he meets would be 'idiots'.
As I understand it, shredding or deleting information that you know is to be used in a criminal case is obstruction of justice. Well maybe they have to be subpoena'd first, but most companies have a retention policy to keep everything once there is even a hint of lawsuit.
TorrentSpy saying "that's only stored in Ram, we don't write it to disk" seems to be pretty close to contempt of court to me. Because they must have known once the court case started someone would try to get hold of a log of which IPs downloaded from which torrents, and they set things up so that they didn't store that information permanently.
The main point of the Core (apart from a load of laughably bad science) is that if you want to be a Leader, you need to be prepared to sacrifice people. Hilary Swank knows she's got what it takes when she allows Tchéky Karyo to be squished like a bug to save the team.
We set up the interviewees with a board with buttons that have pictures of all the cast members. If the interviewee wants to kill someone they press the button.
We've found that the best managers would squish not just him when they need to but an average of 2 other cast members at random points in the movie. Any more than that and their team would run too low on resources and morale to survive, any less and they're clearly not cut out for making hard choices.
You said "You must have a huge stake in proprietary software to cheer about this. Note that if this is the way of the future, it's not only "Check and mate, RMS!", but also "Check and mate, general-purpose personal computer!". So you're saying that showing appreciation for a clever hack implies agreeing with the political implications of it.
I see what you mean, I just disagree. I think you can appreciate hacks without consideration of the long term implications of them. Sort of like you can cheer on a skilful goal even if it's scored against your favourite football team. Actually, I think if you reall appreciate football or engineering for itself rather than mindlessly backing one tribe over the other, that's what you should do - you cheer the skill of the player, not the side he or she plays for.
This hypervisor trick is clever, no matter what you think of the GPL. As it happens, I think piracy is a greater threat to general purpose computers than this hypervisor. If game companies and studios think that PCs are too insecure to be trusted with games and media and refuse to license software players, people will be forced to trusted platforms like the PS3 to play or view them. So I don't really think people cracking DRM is particularly good in the long run because the studios will eventually stop allowing media playback on non trusted platofrms. But despite that, I still think the muslix64 hack is clever and I can appreciate it's cleverness.
For that matter, I can appreciate the engineering in a V2 rocket, despite the fact that the regime that built it was thoroughly evil, it was built with slave labour and it was designed to kill my grandparents. But it's impressive that they managed to make it work with such primitive technology.
That's true. But Microsoft never agreed to distribute GPL3 code, it's just that third parties conspired to change the license out from under them against their wishes. Whatever you think of Microsoft and the FSF that's bogus. You can't get A to agree to one license, offer a B more rights under a new version and then allow the B to decide which one to accept over the objections of A. That just isn't fair, no matter how much you dislike A.
Mind you, it's this sort of possibility that makes me never want to have anything to do with the GPL or FSF. Since intellectual property law is completely non intuitive, the fact that it seems incredibly unjust doesn't necessarily mean that you won't end up in an expensive lawsuit over something like this, or even that you'd win the lawsuit in the end.
"It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them."
So you could have the proprietary stuff in a different process, i.e. a different address space. This seems to confirm it, so long as the proprietary stuff is communicated over a API which doesn't involve 'exchanging complex internal data structures'
Maybe he can appreciate solutions on a technical level without letting politics get in the way. It's was clever of muslix64 to crack AACS, and it was clever of this guy to crack GPL3. Though I can see from the point of view of the FSF and AACS-LA both cracks mean that they wasted a lot of hard work.
Aaah, it's those pesky DPCs in the MMCSS. It's so obvious really.
No. That sentence doesn't mean anything.
DPCs execute in arbitrary thread context that. Nothing to do with a user mode process like MMCSS. But while they are running they can starve even high priority threads since IRQL=DISPATCH_LEVEL and so obviously the dispatcher is disabled.
If you can read Japanese, this article explains it as simply as possible
That's pretty one sided and based entirely on what the Iranian regime claims. There are strong signs that Iranian Jews are discriminated against in a way that would be inconceivable for a religious minority in the West -
Like other religious minorities in Iran, Jews suffer from officially sanctioned discrimination, particularly in the areas of employment, education, and housing. According to the U.S. Department of State, Jews may not occupy senior positions in the government or the military and are prevented from serving in the judiciary and security services and from becoming public school heads.
The antiIsrael policies of the Iranian government, along with a perception among radical Muslims that all Jewish citizens support the State of Israel, create a hostile atmosphere for the Jewish community. In 2004, many Iranian newspapers noted the one-hundredth anniversary of the publishing of the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Jews often are the target of degrading caricatures in the Iranian press. Jewish leaders reportedly are reluctant to draw attention to official mistreatment of their community due to fear of government reprisal.
This is what I was alluding to with the cartoon I posted about American liberals. If Muslims in the West were treated in the way that Jews are treated in Iran, there would be an outcry. And yet the same people will happily believe the Ahmadinejad goverment is treating its Jewish minority well, based purely on government controlled media. All the positive stuff like the Jewish seat in parliament and the Kosher delis comes straight from propaganda from the Iranian government, and remember that even the Nazis claimed to be treating Jews well in their propaganda - until the regime goes we have no idea how Iranian Jews have been treated.
Looking at the article, it seems like the more Islamic the government in Iran, the worse the treatment of Jews. And there is plenty of evidence that Iranian people have a long tradition of viceral anti semitism that pre dates Islam. E.g.
Another European traveller reported a degrading ritual to which Jews were subjected for public amusement:
At every public festival even at the royal salaam [salute], before the Kings face the Jews are collected, and a number of them are flung into the hauz or tank, that King and mob may be amused by seeing them crawl out half-drowned and covered with mud. The same kindly ceremony is witnessed whenever a provincial governor holds high festival: there are fireworks and Jews.
So it's hard to believe that Jews are considered to be equal to Muslims there. In fact as Bernard Lewis pointed out
It's sad to see Americans who see themselves as liberals parroting propaganda from extreme anti democratic nationalists, just because those nationalists happen to be Iranian and anti bush. The fact that they are also anti women, anti gay and anti semitic to the point that they deny the holocaust and talk of wiping Israel off the face of the map is conveniently overlooked.
I'm sorry you obviously have the version 1.0 machine. We're working on fix right now, but we can't figure out a good way to power it from a normal power socket. But if you have access to an industrial 6 phase 4kV 400Hz supply, you're welcome to join our beta testing program.
So out of ten testers we've have 5 dislocated arms, 3 broken ones. The other two had severe whiplash and possibly spinal injuries. But we think we can fix it if the machine grips you hard enough to stop you getting away but without actually crushing your hand.
But the power supply is an issue - we've been working on various energy stores so it can run off normal wall sockets, but pulling someone's fucking arm clean off takes a fair bit of energy. However, silverback gorillas have been know to do it with relatively small arm muscles, and we're going to buy some and disect them to see if we can reverse engineer their enormous upper body strength. The damn things are endangered though, and our rep in the Congo got kidnapped by bandits.
Are you seriously implying that in general men are not stronger than women? Dude you need to get out more. Anyone who has a problem with this IS IGNORING REALITY.
What about Xena the Warrior Princess? She's a woman and she could kick most mens asses. In fact the only people who came close to defeating her were women.
Or Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica - she beat the snot out some dude in the boxing episode. Or that chick in Serenity who's like 50kgs and a deadly weapon. Or Buffy the vampire slayer, another petite girl who kicks ass. Or any of the other heroines in future Joss Whedon stories.
So if people don't know how to lock their doors it's ok to ransack their house? It seems to me that's a short sighted view of the world. Imagine if in the distant future when you're in your 70's there's some technology which you use but don't understand, and people that do use that argument to pillage your stuff because they do.
I actually moved into a block of flat with a laptop with Wifi. I asked the local ISP and they said it would take a month or so to connect DSL. Now I could see a bunch of access points. Luckily the flat had a gardening session so I asked around then and someone gave me permission. She was actually surprised that people could access her internet from outside the apartment, so I showed her how to set up security. Mind you, a bit later one of her friends had trouble entering the stupid long strings of hex digits so she asked me to disable it. It was a flat rate connection anyway.
But even so there are funny corner cases here - what happens if person A uses person B's connection to pirate a bunch of stuff and the police arrive and confiscate their computer looking for evidence of B's piracy when in fact B is completely innocent?
Though of course C,D, and E could exploit this by sharing an unsecured flat rate connection and all profess total innocence of any piracy that goes on. If the police asked, they could say that F used to used to annoy them by maxing out the connection 24/7 and was probably a pirate, but he's since moved to the Caribbean and they have no forwarding address.
I think it's good of the Americans to behave like the Swedes from Telia Sonera AB expect them to. I can imagine the Swedish engineers muttering about "Javlar Americansk vildar" over far too many beers at the end of the week.
Well Microsoft make a bunch of.Net development tools that don't seem to have caught on very well with third parties, so it does make sense.
Most third party shops I suspect have stuck with a mixture of Win32 SDK, ATL and MFC development because they have an enormous codebase and don't feel the need to port. Now to be honest some of those are a pain to learn, once you know them you can churn out Windows applications incredibly quickly. And because they were the only way to do that a few years back, people did learn them.
There was a straw poll on a Microsoft development newsgroup and the vast majority of people actually prefered Visual Studio 98 to later versions since it was quicker and they don't need.Net compatibility for the projects they work on. The VirtualDub author actually ported to.Net and decided that the increased size and decreased speed were not worth it.
All this despite the fact that they give away Visual Studio 2005 Express on their website. I think it's strange case really. In the same way that people don't like Vista because it's slightly bigger and slower than XP, later development environments have never really caught on.
And people graduating from college tend to have used Linux so they don't use either the old or the new Microsoft tools. So Microsoft sense a danger to themselves in the long run. Like no popular.Net applications. And it's new third party Windows only applications that made Windows a killer platform. Old ones will tend to run fine in Wine once people have time to reimplement the API functions they depend on.
All in all, it seems like a sudden conversion to supporting open source projects based on Visual Studio Express seems like a prudent move on their part.
I guess so. Still it seems like a flawed design to me - the retailer should have some gizmo that knows how to send serial numbers off to a server to be validated. Which is not too hard to do - a bar code scanner connected to a PC with some software could so the job. But I guess there's a cost to do that. But if I were coupons.com, I think I'd try to sell the system to retailers that would include that. Not sure how though, it doesn't really seem like it's in the retailer's interest.
Actually, something else occurs to me. It seems that currency has always had special protection against copying, far in excess of copyright law and preceding it by some centuries. Isaac Newton for example was obsessed with inventing ways to catch currency forgers and lobbied to make sure that ones who were caught were hung[1]. And this happened long before copyright was used to stop copying. It seems like digital currency needs to have special laws protecting it - not anti counterfeiting ones since most digital currency is managed by private companies, but certainly anti fraud law needs to be tightened up so that hacking digital currency is very illegal.
Otherwise we will end up in the situation with digital currency that Newton feared would happen with normal currency where counterfeiting and forging causes people to lose confidence in it. And even a rather minimalist, libertarian government needs to stop that from happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's suppose I work for a big company with paranoid lawyers and a stock of patents. I use some "GPLv2 or later" code at work and contribute to it and my company distributes it. That's ok, but GPLv3 comes along and the lawyers don't like the clause about patents. But that doesn't matter because the users can opt to license under GPLv3 and thus demand a patent license. Or maybe not, but after users start opting to use GPLv3, my company's IP rights have been diluted in a way that neither my company nor I would have agreed to. You could say we've been forced to do something we don't want to.
We're forced to open any code we link to GPL code too, so if someone plagiarised some GPL code and used it in some application which uses closed source code we licensed under an NDA from someone else, we have to break either the NDA or the GPL, even if the company as such didn't know about or agree to the plagiarism. We could be forced to open the source code to the stuff we bought a binary license for from a third party because some intern was lazy and dishonest.
Saying no one is forced just shows you don't understand how the commercial software world works. Companies have patents on things they invented, and the license patents from competitors. And they license non GPL binary code from third parties and have no right to distribute the source code, or even access to it. If any employee starts to use GPL code, the company can end up in a situation where it simply can't comply with the GPL without getting sued. Compared to that, DRM like AACS seems quite benign - it's just companies trying to protect their intellectual property from pirates. The GPL is trying to abolish private property.
No that's not what I meant at all. I said both RMS and the AACS-LA try to force people to behave in a particular way, and that's the reason I like seeing them fail, and predicted that you'd try to weasel your way out of a comparison between the two, since you no doubt worship one and hate the other.
And sure enough you said "but RMS doesn't force people to use GPL code" and I pointed out that the AACS-LA doesn't force people to use their movies. Both parties do try to restrict people's behaviour if they do use "their" stuff though, and I've made it completley clear I like seeing them fail. Actually one important difference is that the AACS-LA is acting on the orders of the studios who actually own the music. If the studios don't like their behaviour they presumably have ways to influence it. But programmers dumb enough to contribute code to GPL projects that and leave in the disingenous "users may choose version 2 or a later version" may find that RMS writes later versions that users may opt for and those versions give those users rights over the programmer's employer's patents that the employer is not happy with.
And quite frankly, that's the reason I want to see RMS fall flat on his smug face. AACS getting cracked doesn't really affect me, since I don't plan on buying HDDVD or Blue Ray.
And the people who want to crack AACS could just not copy movies protected by it and only watch the originals on a supported OS. The AACS is not forcing anybody to do anything.
Well no. But RMS and the AACS-LA are both much more obnoxious than civillians in 1940s London. Plus it's not like they get killed, just thwarted in their schemes to force people to behave in some way.
Now I know that you're going to SAY how RMS is forcing Tivo to respect users' rights to modify their set top boxes and it's different from the AACS-LA. But that's subjective. I'm sure the AACS-LA think that their protecting the studio's rights too.
It means that you can't assume that they execute in any particularly thread context.
Actually, the post is a joke - I got the idea from the excellently geeky Undocumented Dos. There's a wonderful, and unintentionally funny story. Dos, being a single tasking OS has a single structure containing the current working directory for each drive and some flags called the CDS. The guys that wrote the book figured out that network redirectors work by setting some flags in the structure and providing a table of functions. Dos then calls out to them. They didn't work at Microsoft or have access to any source code and the whole scheme is undocumented (and the details depend on Dos version) but they successfully reverse engineered it and wrote a filesystem that works. In the first edition of the book, they decided to test in the then new Windows 3.0 by loading their filesystem in one Windows command.com prompt and seeing if the drive letters showed up in another one which they don't. They said that one of the technical reviewers of the first edition commented that 'only an idiot would expect that to work'.
And you can almost see what the reviewer means - since the different Windows command prompts can have different current working directories, they must have local copies of of CDS. In the second edition, they reverse engineered how this works. 16 bit Windows (as in Windows not based on the NT kernel) loads on top of Dos but installs another OS under Dos called the VMM - the Virtual Machine Manager, and that allows 32 bit ring 0 device drivers called VxDs to hook and intercept Dos memory and IO access so that the machine can run multiple Virtual Machines. So each Dos box is a separate VM and each VM gets its own copy of the CDS, thanks do a "Dos manager" VxD that knows enough about Dos internals to instance everything that needs to be instanced.
So this guys definition of an idiot was someone who doesn't play with command prompts for a few seconds on Windows and deduce that the undocumented CDS structure must be per VM instanced and hence that file system redirectors would be local to one Dos box. I find that definition funny, because it would mean that all but a tiny handful of the people he meets would be 'idiots'.
As I understand it, shredding or deleting information that you know is to be used in a criminal case is obstruction of justice. Well maybe they have to be subpoena'd first, but most companies have a retention policy to keep everything once there is even a hint of lawsuit.
TorrentSpy saying "that's only stored in Ram, we don't write it to disk" seems to be pretty close to contempt of court to me. Because they must have known once the court case started someone would try to get hold of a log of which IPs downloaded from which torrents, and they set things up so that they didn't store that information permanently.
In my company I always get the new managers to watch The Core.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/ [imdb.com]
The main point of the Core (apart from a load of laughably bad science) is that if you want to be a Leader, you need to be prepared to sacrifice people. Hilary Swank knows she's got what it takes when she allows Tchéky Karyo to be squished like a bug to save the team.
We set up the interviewees with a board with buttons that have pictures of all the cast members. If the interviewee wants to kill someone they press the button.
We've found that the best managers would squish not just him when they need to but an average of 2 other cast members at random points in the movie. Any more than that and their team would run too low on resources and morale to survive, any less and they're clearly not cut out for making hard choices.
1. Did you read the OP at all?
Yes.
2. You didn't get what I wrote, either
You said "You must have a huge stake in proprietary software to cheer about this. Note that if this is the way of the future, it's not only "Check and mate, RMS!", but also "Check and mate, general-purpose personal computer!". So you're saying that showing appreciation for a clever hack implies agreeing with the political implications of it.
I see what you mean, I just disagree. I think you can appreciate hacks without consideration of the long term implications of them. Sort of like you can cheer on a skilful goal even if it's scored against your favourite football team. Actually, I think if you reall appreciate football or engineering for itself rather than mindlessly backing one tribe over the other, that's what you should do - you cheer the skill of the player, not the side he or she plays for.
This hypervisor trick is clever, no matter what you think of the GPL. As it happens, I think piracy is a greater threat to general purpose computers than this hypervisor. If game companies and studios think that PCs are too insecure to be trusted with games and media and refuse to license software players, people will be forced to trusted platforms like the PS3 to play or view them. So I don't really think people cracking DRM is particularly good in the long run because the studios will eventually stop allowing media playback on non trusted platofrms. But despite that, I still think the muslix64 hack is clever and I can appreciate it's cleverness.
For that matter, I can appreciate the engineering in a V2 rocket, despite the fact that the regime that built it was thoroughly evil, it was built with slave labour and it was designed to kill my grandparents. But it's impressive that they managed to make it work with such primitive technology.
That's true. But Microsoft never agreed to distribute GPL3 code, it's just that third parties conspired to change the license out from under them against their wishes. Whatever you think of Microsoft and the FSF that's bogus. You can't get A to agree to one license, offer a B more rights under a new version and then allow the B to decide which one to accept over the objections of A. That just isn't fair, no matter how much you dislike A.
Mind you, it's this sort of possibility that makes me never want to have anything to do with the GPL or FSF. Since intellectual property law is completely non intuitive, the fact that it seems incredibly unjust doesn't necessarily mean that you won't end up in an expensive lawsuit over something like this, or even that you'd win the lawsuit in the end.
You don't need a separate processor. There are other ways around the GPL.
u gins
e gation
u ntimeAndGPL
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPl
"It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them."
So you could have the proprietary stuff in a different process, i.e. a different address space. This seems to confirm it, so long as the proprietary stuff is communicated over a API which doesn't involve 'exchanging complex internal data structures'
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggr
Or you could make your own C runtime library and put them in that -
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WindowsR
Then when users in your company use the compiler they're allowed to link to the proprietary run time.
Maybe he can appreciate solutions on a technical level without letting politics get in the way. It's was clever of muslix64 to crack AACS, and it was clever of this guy to crack GPL3. Though I can see from the point of view of the FSF and AACS-LA both cracks mean that they wasted a lot of hard work.
No. That sentence doesn't mean anything.
DPCs execute in arbitrary thread context that. Nothing to do with a user mode process like MMCSS. But while they are running they can starve even high priority threads since IRQL=DISPATCH_LEVEL and so obviously the dispatcher is disabled.
If you can read Japanese, this article explains it as simply as possible
http://www.sciencepark.co.jp/community/report/rep
If you don't speak Japanese and can't understand IRQLs then you should be shot quite frankly.
Actually, I'd be happy if the people who quote Orwell in every politics thread would take some time to read this one damn essay -
n glish/e_nat
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/e
It's got a few jabs at their political opponents, but a lot more jabs at them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Jews#Discrim
This is what I was alluding to with the cartoon I posted about American liberals. If Muslims in the West were treated in the way that Jews are treated in Iran, there would be an outcry. And yet the same people will happily believe the Ahmadinejad goverment is treating its Jewish minority well, based purely on government controlled media. All the positive stuff like the Jewish seat in parliament and the Kosher delis comes straight from propaganda from the Iranian government, and remember that even the Nazis claimed to be treating Jews well in their propaganda - until the regime goes we have no idea how Iranian Jews have been treated.
Looking at the article, it seems like the more Islamic the government in Iran, the worse the treatment of Jews. And there is plenty of evidence that Iranian people have a long tradition of viceral anti semitism that pre dates Islam. E.g.
So it's hard to believe that Jews are considered to be equal to Muslims there. In fact as Bernard Lewis pointed out
http://img250.imageshack.us/img250/310/liveb2crapi f7.jpg
It's sad to see Americans who see themselves as liberals parroting propaganda from extreme anti democratic nationalists, just because those nationalists happen to be Iranian and anti bush. The fact that they are also anti women, anti gay and anti semitic to the point that they deny the holocaust and talk of wiping Israel off the face of the map is conveniently overlooked.
Mod parent up. Very good point!
I'm sorry you obviously have the version 1.0 machine. We're working on fix right now, but we can't figure out a good way to power it from a normal power socket. But if you have access to an industrial 6 phase 4kV 400Hz supply, you're welcome to join our beta testing program.
So out of ten testers we've have 5 dislocated arms, 3 broken ones. The other two had severe whiplash and possibly spinal injuries. But we think we can fix it if the machine grips you hard enough to stop you getting away but without actually crushing your hand.
But the power supply is an issue - we've been working on various energy stores so it can run off normal wall sockets, but pulling someone's fucking arm clean off takes a fair bit of energy. However, silverback gorillas have been know to do it with relatively small arm muscles, and we're going to buy some and disect them to see if we can reverse engineer their enormous upper body strength. The damn things are endangered though, and our rep in the Congo got kidnapped by bandits.
But for the meantime I'd stick with 1.0.
Are you seriously implying that in general men are not stronger than women? Dude you need to get out more. Anyone who has a problem with this IS IGNORING REALITY.
What about Xena the Warrior Princess? She's a woman and she could kick most mens asses. In fact the only people who came close to defeating her were women.
Or Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica - she beat the snot out some dude in the boxing episode. Or that chick in Serenity who's like 50kgs and a deadly weapon. Or Buffy the vampire slayer, another petite girl who kicks ass. Or any of the other heroines in future Joss Whedon stories.
I think you're the one who's ignoring reality.
Google tells me that 17 stone is 238 lbs.
This BMI calculator says that to keep your BMI under 25 kg/m^2 you should be 222 or under. Or under 15.857 stones.
Just FYI.
So if people don't know how to lock their doors it's ok to ransack their house? It seems to me that's a short sighted view of the world. Imagine if in the distant future when you're in your 70's there's some technology which you use but don't understand, and people that do use that argument to pillage your stuff because they do.
I actually moved into a block of flat with a laptop with Wifi. I asked the local ISP and they said it would take a month or so to connect DSL. Now I could see a bunch of access points. Luckily the flat had a gardening session so I asked around then and someone gave me permission. She was actually surprised that people could access her internet from outside the apartment, so I showed her how to set up security. Mind you, a bit later one of her friends had trouble entering the stupid long strings of hex digits so she asked me to disable it. It was a flat rate connection anyway.
But even so there are funny corner cases here - what happens if person A uses person B's connection to pirate a bunch of stuff and the police arrive and confiscate their computer looking for evidence of B's piracy when in fact B is completely innocent?
Though of course C,D, and E could exploit this by sharing an unsecured flat rate connection and all profess total innocence of any piracy that goes on. If the police asked, they could say that F used to used to annoy them by maxing out the connection 24/7 and was probably a pirate, but he's since moved to the Caribbean and they have no forwarding address.
I think it's good of the Americans to behave like the Swedes from Telia Sonera AB expect them to. I can imagine the Swedish engineers muttering about "Javlar Americansk vildar" over far too many beers at the end of the week.
Well of course, if people don't read the GPL and accept RMS as their saviour how can their souls be saved from eternal damnation.
Well Microsoft make a bunch of .Net development tools that don't seem to have caught on very well with third parties, so it does make sense.
.Net compatibility for the projects they work on. The VirtualDub author actually ported to .Net and decided that the increased size and decreased speed were not worth it.
.Net applications. And it's new third party Windows only applications that made Windows a killer platform. Old ones will tend to run fine in Wine once people have time to reimplement the API functions they depend on.
Most third party shops I suspect have stuck with a mixture of Win32 SDK, ATL and MFC development because they have an enormous codebase and don't feel the need to port. Now to be honest some of those are a pain to learn, once you know them you can churn out Windows applications incredibly quickly. And because they were the only way to do that a few years back, people did learn them.
There was a straw poll on a Microsoft development newsgroup and the vast majority of people actually prefered Visual Studio 98 to later versions since it was quicker and they don't need
All this despite the fact that they give away Visual Studio 2005 Express on their website. I think it's strange case really. In the same way that people don't like Vista because it's slightly bigger and slower than XP, later development environments have never really caught on.
And people graduating from college tend to have used Linux so they don't use either the old or the new Microsoft tools. So Microsoft sense a danger to themselves in the long run. Like no popular
All in all, it seems like a sudden conversion to supporting open source projects based on Visual Studio Express seems like a prudent move on their part.
I guess so. Still it seems like a flawed design to me - the retailer should have some gizmo that knows how to send serial numbers off to a server to be validated. Which is not too hard to do - a bar code scanner connected to a PC with some software could so the job. But I guess there's a cost to do that. But if I were coupons.com, I think I'd try to sell the system to retailers that would include that. Not sure how though, it doesn't really seem like it's in the retailer's interest.
s pace.html - "Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man" by Stephen Hawking.
Actually, something else occurs to me. It seems that currency has always had special protection against copying, far in excess of copyright law and preceding it by some centuries. Isaac Newton for example was obsessed with inventing ways to catch currency forgers and lobbied to make sure that ones who were caught were hung[1]. And this happened long before copyright was used to stop copying. It seems like digital currency needs to have special laws protecting it - not anti counterfeiting ones since most digital currency is managed by private companies, but certainly anti fraud law needs to be tightened up so that hacking digital currency is very illegal.
Otherwise we will end up in the situation with digital currency that Newton feared would happen with normal currency where counterfeiting and forging causes people to lose confidence in it. And even a rather minimalist, libertarian government needs to stop that from happening.
[1] http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news/2007/8/17755_