All particulars of the case aside, I find it alarming that part of his plea bargain is to waive the right to appeal. I would have thought that the right to appeal - like some rights you have under employment and contract law - would not be a right you could surrender. Can any of the legal slashdotters tell me if this is more nuanced than simply 'you cannot appeal'? I would certainly expect that appeals based on, say, court misconduct would be allowed even after this.
To elaborate my point, a plea bargain is pretty much the definition of an agreement made under duress. Agree to this or we'll lock you up for (an additional) ten years? This is the kind of option that even an innocent man must be tempted by if he thinks the trial will go against him. A plea bargain to be sent to a minimum security prison would also be a temptation even for the innocent. Could you do that and then still appeal based on the fact that your life would have been at hugely increased risk if you had not made the plea?
Yes, ok, embrace and extend is bad and evil but it's not closing anyone's code. MS HTML rendering is what springs to mind, but that's a different (mis)implementation of a standard not an appropriated codebase - and it never stopped anyone writing a proper HTML rendering engine, which was my point.
You're all free to eat at my farm. You're all free to plant things at my farm. You're not free to put a fence around my farm. The fact that you may have planted things at my farm still doesn't give you the right to put a fence around my farm.
As much as I hate nitpicking over software licenses, that's not a valid analogy. Even with public domain software nobody can 'put a fence around your farm' - the original software will always be available regardless of any proprietary extensions other people make.
I don't believe that there are any good analogies for software licenses. The idea of restrictions on how to apply knowledge is completely messed up even before you try and compare it to the use of physical goods.
...
OK, I can't resist. If we're talking about the GPL, it's like telling people they can grow whatever they like on your farm as long as they don't sell the resulting crops, or even use the seeds to grow crops on their own farm for the purpose of sale.
Heard of Dwarf Fortress? The brief description is that it's a single player game about founding a dwarven city where you indirectly control the citizens. The thing is, the developer is kinda crazy about all the things you mentioned so you get to pick the site for your fortress from a world map that has been randomly generated with a thousand years of history full of wars, dragons and kidnapped children. The dwarves all have personality quirks and are quite likely to go mad after having their wife and two best friends killed by a goblin raiding party. It's really quite fantastic. Unfortunately it looks like nethack, but if you can cope with that it's amazing fun.
Could you tell me the relationship between Australian and New Zealand magpies? They look approximately the same to me, apart from an entirely different patterning.
The developer seems to change which critters are super-dangerous from time to time, to keep things interesting/unexpected. Last one I remember was carp. Carp you say? Little fishies? Little fishies that will jump several tiles out of the river and drag your screaming fisherdwarf back to be devoured in a frenzy of gummy nibbling.
Dwarf fortress is absolutely stupendous in many respects. It has a physics simulation, to the degree that a tile-based world allows. Severed body parts fly through the air to land an appropriate distance away for their weight and the force applied to them. My axe-wielding hunter was chasing horses - got one backed up at the top of the cliff. Hunter leaps at the horse from three tiles away, dealing huge damage but carrying them both over the cliff to plummet two z-levels onto the ground below. Horse is severely dead, hunter still walking (barely). Bruised and bleeding hunter hauls horse carcass back to the butcher for dinner. Nothing scripted, just an emergent story based on the interaction between behaviours and the world.
Sometime in the late 80's I bought my first RPG, Ultima IV for the Sega Master System. My eyes just about popped out of my head when the store clerk, after finding the cartridge to put in the empty display box, fished around out in the store room and returned with two additional decent quality printed manuals/background documents, each slightly larger than the game packaging. This level of luxury fan service definitely helped hook me on the series.
For those who are interested, the Sega Master System port of Ultima IV was very good. It used an updated 8-bit colour tile set and changed the 3D dungeon sections to be top-down like the rest of the game, but I believe it was otherwise complete in every aspect.
As another commenter mentioned, I think the computer is using monte carlo sampling to support a traditional analysis of the board (with living/dead groups and good/bad shape). Several years ago when I was playing with GNUGo it definitely used an AI based on dividing the board into groups and determining their status. GNUGo was also pathetically weak compared to human players; it was barely a match for my meager skills to begin with, and once I spotted a couple of flaws in its tactical play it wasn't worth playing against any more. Interestingly, some monte carlo sampling would probably have been just the thing to fix the predictable weaknesses I was exploiting.
In summary, strategic analysis is definitely an important part of Go AI and random sampling is a supporting heuristic method.
I detect that you weren't asking a serious question, but in case anyone is wondering, yes, you need to be a citizen otherwise you'll just get kicked out of the country. Dole bludgers aren't any different from whatever you call the hated but possibly mythical benefit slags in America whenever somebody complains about their taxes being used to feed filthy layabouts.
I'm not an expert on the economics of social benefits, but they're certainly one of the things I'm happy to put my taxes towards. I firmly believe that one of the most important duties of democratic governments is to ensure that citizens are not left without food or shelter due to misfortune. The major reason I don't want to live in America is the lack of a safety net for citizens who act in good faith but are unlucky with their work or health. </rant>
Off the top of my head, the unemployment benefit in New Zealand is worth about 15 hours of minimum wage work per week. That's enough to get a crappy place to live and food. Of course there are people who choose an extremely crappy place to live and spend the rest on cigarettes or alcohol but I'm more willing to take one for the team and support them than I am to cut support to the unfortunate but cooperative unemployed.
Interestingly, the minimum wage in New Zealand is $NZ11.25 per hour, which I think is well above the US rate even after considering the exchange rate (about 0.8) and living costs. Armchair economics suggests to me that even though (I think) unemployment benefits are better in New Zealand than America, the difference between the unemployment benefit and part time minimum wage work is even greater which should encourage people to take any job which isn't completely shite rather than being a dole bludger.
I don't want to get into an argument about religion here but... well, fuck it. The above above is a rant? It reads to me like a mildly humorous but factually correct discription of Christian beliefs. It didn't even mention invisible friends or ritual cannibalism. I'm surprised at your strong reaction to it.
For the record, I'm not American. American Christianity seems to be a very different beast from the European variety.
I'm from New Zealand and it's quite familiar to me, although I always assumed it was a Britishism. The classic formulation is "Dole bludger", n. a person who receives the unemployment benefit (the dole) as a lifestyle choice and who does not intend to take paid work. A bludger is also somebody who, for instance, will cheerfully accept drinks bought for them in a pub but will never buy a round themselves.
In support of your comment, I direct you to the wikipedia entry on SI units. The map of world adoption of SI is particularly embarrassing:
"Three nations have not officially adopted the International System of Units as their primary or sole system of measurement: Liberia, Myanmar and the United States."
I challenge you to find any advantage of Fahrenheit over Celsius which isn't based on the fact that Fahrenheit is what you grew up with. Wicked cold and wicked hot map equally well to temperature ranges in Celsuis which are quite natural if that's the system you grew up with, with the added bonus that 0 is the freezing point of water and 100 is the boiling point.
Yes, the choice of measurement system is largely academic, but this is the internet man! What is there but quibbling over trivialities?
As an interesting corollary to your post, it seems like many of the posters here think they're getting the benefits of socialism rather than insurance. Insurance is about fairly sharing risk; socialism is about everyone cooperating to recover from disasters on personal or national scale.
I vastly prefer socialised health systems; the thought of having an insurance company trying to avoid paying my claim when I suffer an illness which would financially destroy me is extremely frightening. Even worse for those who are 'uninsurable'. One of the things I like least about American society is the willingness to let the weak or unfortunate lie where they fall. </rant>
I agree with you, but perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way? I couldn't do productive work in that kind of space, but if the job I had happened to consist of sitting around chatting and enjoying the sun... now that would be a workspace I would like!
Not that I RTFPaper, but hungry orphans is a bad example if you're trying to show that people are irrational. The objective is to have as few starving orphans as possible, so trading three fewer starving orphans for 300 fewer thanksgiving-stuffed-full orphans is still a win, even if a lot of food is wasted in the process.
Now if there was research showing that people would rather throw food away than give it as an unfair surplus to some of the orphans, THAT would be news.
Not that I doubt you, but why would planets not twinkle? Isn't twinkling caused by atmospheric moisture? Is it something to do with planets appearing as teeny tiny dots rather than points?
Slashdot Mirror
All particulars of the case aside, I find it alarming that part of his plea bargain is to waive the right to appeal. I would have thought that the right to appeal - like some rights you have under employment and contract law - would not be a right you could surrender. Can any of the legal slashdotters tell me if this is more nuanced than simply 'you cannot appeal'? I would certainly expect that appeals based on, say, court misconduct would be allowed even after this.
To elaborate my point, a plea bargain is pretty much the definition of an agreement made under duress. Agree to this or we'll lock you up for (an additional) ten years? This is the kind of option that even an innocent man must be tempted by if he thinks the trial will go against him. A plea bargain to be sent to a minimum security prison would also be a temptation even for the innocent. Could you do that and then still appeal based on the fact that your life would have been at hugely increased risk if you had not made the plea?
Yes, ok, embrace and extend is bad and evil but it's not closing anyone's code. MS HTML rendering is what springs to mind, but that's a different (mis)implementation of a standard not an appropriated codebase - and it never stopped anyone writing a proper HTML rendering engine, which was my point.
You're all free to eat at my farm. You're all free to plant things at my farm. You're not free to put a fence around my farm. The fact that you may have planted things at my farm still doesn't give you the right to put a fence around my farm.
As much as I hate nitpicking over software licenses, that's not a valid analogy. Even with public domain software nobody can 'put a fence around your farm' - the original software will always be available regardless of any proprietary extensions other people make.
I don't believe that there are any good analogies for software licenses. The idea of restrictions on how to apply knowledge is completely messed up even before you try and compare it to the use of physical goods.
...
OK, I can't resist. If we're talking about the GPL, it's like telling people they can grow whatever they like on your farm as long as they don't sell the resulting crops, or even use the seeds to grow crops on their own farm for the purpose of sale.
And when one of the wheels seizes up, support will tell you to be excited because your car is now also a plow!
Heard of Dwarf Fortress? The brief description is that it's a single player game about founding a dwarven city where you indirectly control the citizens. The thing is, the developer is kinda crazy about all the things you mentioned so you get to pick the site for your fortress from a world map that has been randomly generated with a thousand years of history full of wars, dragons and kidnapped children. The dwarves all have personality quirks and are quite likely to go mad after having their wife and two best friends killed by a goblin raiding party. It's really quite fantastic. Unfortunately it looks like nethack, but if you can cope with that it's amazing fun.
Does that mean they'll start making proper beer now?
Good effort. I suggest you further your education in Australian by watching Hercules Returns
Could you tell me the relationship between Australian and New Zealand magpies? They look approximately the same to me, apart from an entirely different patterning.
The developer seems to change which critters are super-dangerous from time to time, to keep things interesting/unexpected. Last one I remember was carp. Carp you say? Little fishies? Little fishies that will jump several tiles out of the river and drag your screaming fisherdwarf back to be devoured in a frenzy of gummy nibbling.
Dwarf fortress is absolutely stupendous in many respects. It has a physics simulation, to the degree that a tile-based world allows. Severed body parts fly through the air to land an appropriate distance away for their weight and the force applied to them. My axe-wielding hunter was chasing horses - got one backed up at the top of the cliff. Hunter leaps at the horse from three tiles away, dealing huge damage but carrying them both over the cliff to plummet two z-levels onto the ground below. Horse is severely dead, hunter still walking (barely). Bruised and bleeding hunter hauls horse carcass back to the butcher for dinner. Nothing scripted, just an emergent story based on the interaction between behaviours and the world.
I wonder if there's any geek among the old profession who will be kind enough to provide the technical details...
It's rude to assume that FORTRAN programmers frequent prostitutes, but I must admit I'm curious too.
Taxes. Although some would say that is equivalent to stealing your property.
Don't be a fool. You think they can get a downhill advantage going both ways? Come back when you know something about physics.
Sometime in the late 80's I bought my first RPG, Ultima IV for the Sega Master System. My eyes just about popped out of my head when the store clerk, after finding the cartridge to put in the empty display box, fished around out in the store room and returned with two additional decent quality printed manuals/background documents, each slightly larger than the game packaging. This level of luxury fan service definitely helped hook me on the series.
For those who are interested, the Sega Master System port of Ultima IV was very good. It used an updated 8-bit colour tile set and changed the 3D dungeon sections to be top-down like the rest of the game, but I believe it was otherwise complete in every aspect.
As another commenter mentioned, I think the computer is using monte carlo sampling to support a traditional analysis of the board (with living/dead groups and good/bad shape). Several years ago when I was playing with GNUGo it definitely used an AI based on dividing the board into groups and determining their status. GNUGo was also pathetically weak compared to human players; it was barely a match for my meager skills to begin with, and once I spotted a couple of flaws in its tactical play it wasn't worth playing against any more. Interestingly, some monte carlo sampling would probably have been just the thing to fix the predictable weaknesses I was exploiting.
In summary, strategic analysis is definitely an important part of Go AI and random sampling is a supporting heuristic method.
This is clearly a benevolent act by Mr Norris, as a single one of his roundhouse kicks would have destroyed the entire legal system.
Yeah, I should have said "I originally thought this was a Britishism but clearly I was wrong"
I detect that you weren't asking a serious question, but in case anyone is wondering, yes, you need to be a citizen otherwise you'll just get kicked out of the country. Dole bludgers aren't any different from whatever you call the hated but possibly mythical benefit slags in America whenever somebody complains about their taxes being used to feed filthy layabouts.
I'm not an expert on the economics of social benefits, but they're certainly one of the things I'm happy to put my taxes towards. I firmly believe that one of the most important duties of democratic governments is to ensure that citizens are not left without food or shelter due to misfortune. The major reason I don't want to live in America is the lack of a safety net for citizens who act in good faith but are unlucky with their work or health. </rant>
Off the top of my head, the unemployment benefit in New Zealand is worth about 15 hours of minimum wage work per week. That's enough to get a crappy place to live and food. Of course there are people who choose an extremely crappy place to live and spend the rest on cigarettes or alcohol but I'm more willing to take one for the team and support them than I am to cut support to the unfortunate but cooperative unemployed.
Interestingly, the minimum wage in New Zealand is $NZ11.25 per hour, which I think is well above the US rate even after considering the exchange rate (about 0.8) and living costs. Armchair economics suggests to me that even though (I think) unemployment benefits are better in New Zealand than America, the difference between the unemployment benefit and part time minimum wage work is even greater which should encourage people to take any job which isn't completely shite rather than being a dole bludger.
I don't want to get into an argument about religion here but... well, fuck it. The above above is a rant? It reads to me like a mildly humorous but factually correct discription of Christian beliefs. It didn't even mention invisible friends or ritual cannibalism. I'm surprised at your strong reaction to it.
For the record, I'm not American. American Christianity seems to be a very different beast from the European variety.
I'm from New Zealand and it's quite familiar to me, although I always assumed it was a Britishism. The classic formulation is "Dole bludger", n. a person who receives the unemployment benefit (the dole) as a lifestyle choice and who does not intend to take paid work. A bludger is also somebody who, for instance, will cheerfully accept drinks bought for them in a pub but will never buy a round themselves.
In support of your comment, I direct you to the wikipedia entry on SI units. The map of world adoption of SI is particularly embarrassing:
"Three nations have not officially adopted the International System of Units as their primary or sole system of measurement: Liberia, Myanmar and the United States."
I challenge you to find any advantage of Fahrenheit over Celsius which isn't based on the fact that Fahrenheit is what you grew up with. Wicked cold and wicked hot map equally well to temperature ranges in Celsuis which are quite natural if that's the system you grew up with, with the added bonus that 0 is the freezing point of water and 100 is the boiling point.
Yes, the choice of measurement system is largely academic, but this is the internet man! What is there but quibbling over trivialities?
As an interesting corollary to your post, it seems like many of the posters here think they're getting the benefits of socialism rather than insurance. Insurance is about fairly sharing risk; socialism is about everyone cooperating to recover from disasters on personal or national scale.
I vastly prefer socialised health systems; the thought of having an insurance company trying to avoid paying my claim when I suffer an illness which would financially destroy me is extremely frightening. Even worse for those who are 'uninsurable'. One of the things I like least about American society is the willingness to let the weak or unfortunate lie where they fall. </rant>
I agree with you, but perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way? I couldn't do productive work in that kind of space, but if the job I had happened to consist of sitting around chatting and enjoying the sun... now that would be a workspace I would like!
Not that I RTFPaper, but hungry orphans is a bad example if you're trying to show that people are irrational. The objective is to have as few starving orphans as possible, so trading three fewer starving orphans for 300 fewer thanksgiving-stuffed-full orphans is still a win, even if a lot of food is wasted in the process.
Now if there was research showing that people would rather throw food away than give it as an unfair surplus to some of the orphans, THAT would be news.
Not that I doubt you, but why would planets not twinkle? Isn't twinkling caused by atmospheric moisture? Is it something to do with planets appearing as teeny tiny dots rather than points?