I no more have the 'right' to freely copy the game 'bioshock' without paying for it, than I do to go into my local store and take whatever food I want.
With respect, that's not a fair comparison. If you take food from your store you're depriving other people of it. The comparison would hold if you could be satisfied by merely looking at food, and you strolled through the 7-11 without buying anything when you were hungry. You would be satisfied and the store would not have lost stock, but the producer would not have been compensated for their work.
Ok, so I totally ruined that analogy. The point remains, you have not deprived anyone of anything - just failed to compensate them for something you found useful. It's still wrong by most people's gut feeling, but in a different way then stealing. See the stupid "you wouldn't steal a car..." ads before movies.
If I want to voluntarily go without the bioshock game for a week while I lend it to a friend that's fine, but if we both want to be free to enjoy the game unrestricted at our leisure, then we need to purchase two copies. This is entirely reasonable.
That's a common position to take, but it's similar to just pirating the game. Consider that in both cases the developer is only compensated for a subset of the people who enjoyed the game. It might feel 'fairer', but the end result is the same.
I'm not trying to tear you down, just playing devil's advocate.
Anytime you compress something (music, video, image, etc.) something is lost that cannot be restored by decompression.
Not true, you're thinking of lossy compression. Most things* can be losslessly compressed, but will be a larger proportion of their original size than if you're willing to throw away some of the data by using lossy compression. Consider:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBAAAAAAAAAA
can be compressed as:
A15B5A10
Which is both compressed and lossless.
*for any compression algorithm there are certain inputs that, rather than being compressed, will actually result in a larger output file. This is rarely a problem, but does happen when you have a.rar full of jpeg images or mp3s for instance.
I would like to add that there is evolutionary (oh, the irony) pressure which makes people want other people to not have sex. Every child other people don't have is one less for your own children to compete with.
If you can convince your peers to remain celibate while you are extremely promiscuous, your children will dominate the gene pool.
I'm not sure if you were talking about general risk, or specifically STD risk but it reminds me of something a lecturer told me when I was at uni: "Married men have a longer life expectancy than single men. This sounds miraculous, but it's not - my wife gets angry when I do stupid stuff".
...but with WoW there is an almost endless supply of class/race/build combinations to tinker with. Us casual players enjoy such things.
1. Race only changes whose ass you're looking at while you play. 2. Playing alts above level 20 is not practical for casual players - levelling takes too long.
I think you threw that comment in without really thinking about it. Not that I disagree entirely, but WoW is not notably different from other games in that area, and most of the endgame is inaccessible to casual players.
My own opinion is that WoW is the same crack that Diablo II was, but with a persistant world (and slower levelling). Blizzard have an impressive understanding of reinforcement learning. From Wikipedia:
Ratio schedules produce higher rates of responding than interval schedules Variable schedules produce higher rates and greater resistance to extinction [of behaviour patterns] than most fixed schedules
Variable ratio (VR) schedules deliver reinforcement after a random number of responses (based upon a predetermined average) Example: VR3 = on average, every third response is reinforced Lab example: VR10 = on average, a rat is reinforced for each 10 bar presses Real world example: VR100 = on average a particular bachelor will get the phone number of the bachelorette he approaches
And there you have the mechanic for most of WoW's drops. Collect 10 gnoll tails which drop 40% of the time you kill a gnoll. Kill Ragnaros and hope one part of your tier 2 armour set drops.
The other area where WoW shines is in its art and scenario direction. The cartoony style looks good without having to push an insane number of polygons, and all of the models are quite endearing, even the animated corpses and murderous insectoids.
The fact that children in Africa are accessing porn is a good sign. It's f*cking AMAZING! Why? Because... If they are connected, then can receive information and they can SEND information.
*snicker* Sorry, I realise you're not advocating this at all, but a selective quotation of your post makes it sound like you're excited about Africans achieving financial independance as producers of child porn. Good luck with that political career;)
Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. I guess that means the problem would be intractable unless there was some way to figure out which release the signature was added in - and if you have leverage to get that much info it's probably just easier to get specifics directly from an insider somewhere.
A question. If a malware detector wants to avoid detecting government malware, would they need to explicitly whitelist it or merely fail to blacklist it?
If they do whitelist government malware, is it possible to read the whitelist and extract the signatures of the whitelisted malware - and then search your system using a modified scanner and the signature they so thoughtfully provided?
the GPLv3 guarantees the user the four freedoms (use, modify, distribute, improve)
Possibly. It guarantees that you either have (software && fourFreedoms) or !software. If a company releases a 'tivo' style system anyway, then you simply won't have the software. It is not clear that this is a better situation for the end user than having a tivo style system with better but unmodifiable software (but it is worth discussing).
If you do not like the GPLv3, chances are you never liked the GPLv2 either... If you are alright with people taking your code and not contributing back, by all means use BSD instead.
That would be me (not that I've ever coded anything useful - and I also support closed code; I just think that if you want to make something free you should do it properly). I find the GPLv3 discussions very interesting because v3 has made the reservations I had about v2 more obvious, and people who used to support GPLv2 are noticing.
So what? They used open (actually open, not GPL) code in a closed project. The original code is still open, and you can use it if you want to. You haven't lost anything. The only difference in the world is that Microsoft didn't have to reinvent the wheel for their own OS.
In the same vein as Voltaire's quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it, I may disagree with the business practices of a company or individual, but I support their right to use the solution to a previously solved problem. I wouldn't be happy about Microsoft doing the same with GPL code, but that's because it would be against the explicit wishes of the authors. If a problem has been solved once, I prefer that the solution should be made available to everyone equally. To do otherwise is spiteful and wasteful.
Speaking of spiteful, I hope a mod comes along and dings you some karma for your childish namecalling.
#bsd... [@evildude] -oo developer1 developer2 [developer1] this sucks.
That's an incorrect analogy, BSD code can't be closed. evildude can't lock out the original developers, but neither can they revoke his privileges. If channelop exists, it is open to all. [snark]How terrible it is when people you don't like are also free [/snark].
For my analogy, I consider that spreading free software by licensing under the GPL is like spreading democracy by developing an anti-cancer drug and only licensing it to countries using UN approved, paper ballot elections. Sure you're making a point, but is it better than just letting everyone make the drug (bsd)?
I don't think that would be a fork though; I'd say it was a distinct but similar license (AGPL) which is explicitly mentioned in the GPL.
If the GPL was forked, say at version 4, I would expect there to be a GPL 4a and GPL 4b where both were considered successors of GPL 3. It would be very bad if anyone could make a legitimate fork of the GPL, because their new license would be a valid target for the "...or later versions..." clause which some GPL licenses include. I'm unhappy with that clause anyway, because even if only the FSF can issue new GPL versions, it still relies on the FSF not being evil or subverted by another group in the future.
On a side note, it occurs to me that GPL code can't be used in LGPL projects. I never hear this mentioned, is it ever raised as a concern? It seems like it would be a good example of the GPL not being as free as people often assume it to be.
I admire your sentiment, but I doubt that private gun ownership is keeping your government honest. For one thing, I don't think a citizens' militia would have a hope in hell without the support of the military. For another, is your government honest to start with? Speaking as a citizen of another first world country, you guys sure have it rough these days.
Isn't it possible that a large portion of the genes that are responsible for eyes and wriggling existed in the common ancestor as junk DNA?
Consulting the timeline in The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins tells me that that the last time we had a common ancestor with sharks was 460 million years ago, when our family tree split into sharks on one side and ray-finned fish on the other. We (and dolphins) are slightly more related to sharks than we are to lampreys, sea squirts and starfish. But that's not really important, just interesting.
I think the reason we don't expect to find backup plans hidden in junk DNA is because, by its junky, unused nature, junk DNA can't be selected for during evolution. That means it's much more open to destructive mutation (because a harmful mutation in junk DNA can't be selected against), and the chances of a complex, inactive behaviours or body plans being stored are very small.
On the other hand, I think you have a point that even though the common ancestor of sharks and dolphins is a long time ago, it would still predispose them to finding the same solutions to problems. I think the best point to make would be that both sharks and dolphins have a backbone, and if you have a backbone wriggling is a pretty freaking obvious way of moving. The difference between up-down and side-to-side is cosmetic, and if you have a backbone either is much more practical than evolving to jet along like a squid.
Similarly with eyes, I seem to recall that eyes generally start out as patches of slightly light-sensitive skin which eventually become more specialised. I don't think any of the eyes we know about evolved any other way, but I don't have a reference handy. Given that there's an obvious way for skin to evolve into eyes, it makes sense that every creature with skin developed eyes more or less the same way - evolution tends to follow the path of least resistance. If we meet aliens who have skin, it's likely that they will have evolved eyes the same way we did, and they may appear no more different than any of the other eyes that have evolved on earth... But what if we meet aliens that don't have skin?
Life's Solution by Simon Conway Morris is a detailed look at convergent evolution, and why we could expect intelligent life to turn out with a lot of the same features that we have. The title is the usual controversial statement required for science publishing, but the book is very reasonable, if heavy going.
I'm an opera user from way back. I looked at the discussion system once and gave it up as a horrible mess, I wasn't interested enough to find out how the discussion system is actually meant to work so I'm not sure precisely what goes wrong.
The floaty box at the side is infuriating, I think because of the way it's coded it doesn't re-calculate its position until you've scrolled an entire 'increment', which makes the box jump around.
Again, I don't know the details, but I think that opera doesn't request comments from the server until you click the little plus sign to reveal them which would explain the delays and randomness.
I say again, I don't actually know how the implementation works, but I get the impression that the discussion system was coded for Firefox. I for one welcome our new overlords, just like the old overlords.
On a brighter note, I recommend you play with the mouse gestures in opera. You can do some cool tricks by combining operations under one gesture, for example:
GestureUp: Enter fullscreen | Leave fullscreen
will put opera into fullscreen mode, or if for some reason that fails (like it's already fullscreen) it will leave fullscreen mode. Read the | as OR.
I also really like GestureUp, GestureLeft: Switch to previous page [previous tab, that is] GestureDown, GestureLeft: Close page, 1 & Switch to previous page
- and their opposites for 'next page'. Combined with middle clicking to open links in a new tab it makes browsing a breeze, since it cuts out most of the clicking on little buttons on toolbars.
Convergent evolution is very well established though. Consider dolphins and sharks - their common ancestors are further back than when pre-dolphins started living in the water, but both have developed similar hydrodynamic shapes and move through the water by wriggling their bodies. The most interesting bit is that although both creatures move using the same principles, sharks wriggle side-to-side while dolphins wriggle up-down. It is reasonable to expect that useful adaptations will be developed independantly since there are only a few good solutions to most problems.
Eyes are another good example - they've been independantly developed several times, but there are only a couple of sensible ways to make them so unrelated eyes still usually look the same. Not always of course, I think octopi use a pinhole camera eye rather than a lens eye.
Are you sure? I tried wearing one on my finger like a ring, but it didn't turn me invisible or make me into a wraith or anything. Perhaps you mean they're forged of pure stupid?;)
I agree wholeheartedly! It's great to see that Microsoft business tools don't need the user to bend over backwards any more. Pretty much the opposite, in fact...
I disagree. Microsoft has been losing pagerank in their traditional stronghold areas. It's not a crisis yet, but I can see why they'd want to do some preventative maintenance on their Google reputation. For example, this traditional Microsoft meme doesn't return a microsoft.com page in the first half dozen pages of results any more, although there are still a lot of people talking about Microsoft. It seems like they're becoming less relevant in some of their traditional areas of strength.
Whenever I hear someone mention "...the shoulders of giants..." I feel obliged to point out the funny story behind the phrase. From the Wikipedia article on Isaac Newton:
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants"
Historians generally think the above quote was an attack on Hooke (who was short and hunchbacked). The two were in a dispute [accusation of plagiarism against Newton] over optical discoveries at the time.
Nothing wrong with that - if it's a token of your intention to divorce. "Here honey, I got this for you. It matches the inky blackness of your heart.";)
Slashdot Mirror
I no more have the 'right' to freely copy the game 'bioshock' without paying for it, than I do to go into my local store and take whatever food I want.
With respect, that's not a fair comparison. If you take food from your store you're depriving other people of it. The comparison would hold if you could be satisfied by merely looking at food, and you strolled through the 7-11 without buying anything when you were hungry. You would be satisfied and the store would not have lost stock, but the producer would not have been compensated for their work.
Ok, so I totally ruined that analogy. The point remains, you have not deprived anyone of anything - just failed to compensate them for something you found useful. It's still wrong by most people's gut feeling, but in a different way then stealing. See the stupid "you wouldn't steal a car..." ads before movies.
If I want to voluntarily go without the bioshock game for a week while I lend it to a friend that's fine, but if we both want to be free to enjoy the game unrestricted at our leisure, then we need to purchase two copies. This is entirely reasonable.
That's a common position to take, but it's similar to just pirating the game. Consider that in both cases the developer is only compensated for a subset of the people who enjoyed the game. It might feel 'fairer', but the end result is the same.
I'm not trying to tear you down, just playing devil's advocate.
Anytime you compress something (music, video, image, etc.) something is lost that cannot be restored by decompression.
.rar full of jpeg images or mp3s for instance.
Not true, you're thinking of lossy compression. Most things* can be losslessly compressed, but will be a larger proportion of their original size than if you're willing to throw away some of the data by using lossy compression. Consider:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBAAAAAAAAAA
can be compressed as:
A15B5A10
Which is both compressed and lossless.
*for any compression algorithm there are certain inputs that, rather than being compressed, will actually result in a larger output file. This is rarely a problem, but does happen when you have a
I would like to add that there is evolutionary (oh, the irony) pressure which makes people want other people to not have sex. Every child other people don't have is one less for your own children to compete with.
If you can convince your peers to remain celibate while you are extremely promiscuous, your children will dominate the gene pool.
I'm not sure if you were talking about general risk, or specifically STD risk but it reminds me of something a lecturer told me when I was at uni: "Married men have a longer life expectancy than single men. This sounds miraculous, but it's not - my wife gets angry when I do stupid stuff".
In NZ, National Bank ATMs give out $10x2 and the rest in 20s. It's very handy.
1. Race only changes whose ass you're looking at while you play.
2. Playing alts above level 20 is not practical for casual players - levelling takes too long.
I think you threw that comment in without really thinking about it. Not that I disagree entirely, but WoW is not notably different from other games in that area, and most of the endgame is inaccessible to casual players.
My own opinion is that WoW is the same crack that Diablo II was, but with a persistant world (and slower levelling). Blizzard have an impressive understanding of reinforcement learning. From Wikipedia:
And there you have the mechanic for most of WoW's drops. Collect 10 gnoll tails which drop 40% of the time you kill a gnoll. Kill Ragnaros and hope one part of your tier 2 armour set drops.
The other area where WoW shines is in its art and scenario direction. The cartoony style looks good without having to push an insane number of polygons, and all of the models are quite endearing, even the animated corpses and murderous insectoids.
The fact that children in Africa are accessing porn is a good sign. It's f*cking AMAZING! Why? Because... If they are connected, then can receive information and they can SEND information.
;)
*snicker* Sorry, I realise you're not advocating this at all, but a selective quotation of your post makes it sound like you're excited about Africans achieving financial independance as producers of child porn. Good luck with that political career
Number one symptom: Half of all outgoing port 80 requests are to slashdot.org.
I'm safe then; on my projects the ratio never falls that low.
Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. I guess that means the problem would be intractable unless there was some way to figure out which release the signature was added in - and if you have leverage to get that much info it's probably just easier to get specifics directly from an insider somewhere.
A question. If a malware detector wants to avoid detecting government malware, would they need to explicitly whitelist it or merely fail to blacklist it?
If they do whitelist government malware, is it possible to read the whitelist and extract the signatures of the whitelisted malware - and then search your system using a modified scanner and the signature they so thoughtfully provided?
the GPLv3 guarantees the user the four freedoms (use, modify, distribute, improve)
Possibly. It guarantees that you either have (software && fourFreedoms) or !software. If a company releases a 'tivo' style system anyway, then you simply won't have the software. It is not clear that this is a better situation for the end user than having a tivo style system with better but unmodifiable software (but it is worth discussing).
If you do not like the GPLv3, chances are you never liked the GPLv2 either... If you are alright with people taking your code and not contributing back, by all means use BSD instead.
That would be me (not that I've ever coded anything useful - and I also support closed code; I just think that if you want to make something free you should do it properly). I find the GPLv3 discussions very interesting because v3 has made the reservations I had about v2 more obvious, and people who used to support GPLv2 are noticing.
So what? They used open (actually open, not GPL) code in a closed project. The original code is still open, and you can use it if you want to. You haven't lost anything. The only difference in the world is that Microsoft didn't have to reinvent the wheel for their own OS.
In the same vein as Voltaire's quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it, I may disagree with the business practices of a company or individual, but I support their right to use the solution to a previously solved problem. I wouldn't be happy about Microsoft doing the same with GPL code, but that's because it would be against the explicit wishes of the authors. If a problem has been solved once, I prefer that the solution should be made available to everyone equally. To do otherwise is spiteful and wasteful.
Speaking of spiteful, I hope a mod comes along and dings you some karma for your childish namecalling.
You know what they say about assuming?
;)
When you assume you make a reasonable prediction based on past experience?
That's an incorrect analogy, BSD code can't be closed. evildude can't lock out the original developers, but neither can they revoke his privileges. If channelop exists, it is open to all. [snark]How terrible it is when people you don't like are also free [/snark].
For my analogy, I consider that spreading free software by licensing under the GPL is like spreading democracy by developing an anti-cancer drug and only licensing it to countries using UN approved, paper ballot elections. Sure you're making a point, but is it better than just letting everyone make the drug (bsd)?
I don't think that would be a fork though; I'd say it was a distinct but similar license (AGPL) which is explicitly mentioned in the GPL.
If the GPL was forked, say at version 4, I would expect there to be a GPL 4a and GPL 4b where both were considered successors of GPL 3. It would be very bad if anyone could make a legitimate fork of the GPL, because their new license would be a valid target for the "...or later versions..." clause which some GPL licenses include. I'm unhappy with that clause anyway, because even if only the FSF can issue new GPL versions, it still relies on the FSF not being evil or subverted by another group in the future.
On a side note, it occurs to me that GPL code can't be used in LGPL projects. I never hear this mentioned, is it ever raised as a concern? It seems like it would be a good example of the GPL not being as free as people often assume it to be.
I admire your sentiment, but I doubt that private gun ownership is keeping your government honest. For one thing, I don't think a citizens' militia would have a hope in hell without the support of the military. For another, is your government honest to start with? Speaking as a citizen of another first world country, you guys sure have it rough these days.
Isn't it possible that a large portion of the genes that are responsible for eyes and wriggling existed in the common ancestor as junk DNA?
Consulting the timeline in The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins tells me that that the last time we had a common ancestor with sharks was 460 million years ago, when our family tree split into sharks on one side and ray-finned fish on the other. We (and dolphins) are slightly more related to sharks than we are to lampreys, sea squirts and starfish. But that's not really important, just interesting.
I think the reason we don't expect to find backup plans hidden in junk DNA is because, by its junky, unused nature, junk DNA can't be selected for during evolution. That means it's much more open to destructive mutation (because a harmful mutation in junk DNA can't be selected against), and the chances of a complex, inactive behaviours or body plans being stored are very small.
On the other hand, I think you have a point that even though the common ancestor of sharks and dolphins is a long time ago, it would still predispose them to finding the same solutions to problems. I think the best point to make would be that both sharks and dolphins have a backbone, and if you have a backbone wriggling is a pretty freaking obvious way of moving. The difference between up-down and side-to-side is cosmetic, and if you have a backbone either is much more practical than evolving to jet along like a squid.
Similarly with eyes, I seem to recall that eyes generally start out as patches of slightly light-sensitive skin which eventually become more specialised. I don't think any of the eyes we know about evolved any other way, but I don't have a reference handy. Given that there's an obvious way for skin to evolve into eyes, it makes sense that every creature with skin developed eyes more or less the same way - evolution tends to follow the path of least resistance. If we meet aliens who have skin, it's likely that they will have evolved eyes the same way we did, and they may appear no more different than any of the other eyes that have evolved on earth... But what if we meet aliens that don't have skin?
Life's Solution by Simon Conway Morris is a detailed look at convergent evolution, and why we could expect intelligent life to turn out with a lot of the same features that we have. The title is the usual controversial statement required for science publishing, but the book is very reasonable, if heavy going.
I'm an opera user from way back. I looked at the discussion system once and gave it up as a horrible mess, I wasn't interested enough to find out how the discussion system is actually meant to work so I'm not sure precisely what goes wrong.
The floaty box at the side is infuriating, I think because of the way it's coded it doesn't re-calculate its position until you've scrolled an entire 'increment', which makes the box jump around.
Again, I don't know the details, but I think that opera doesn't request comments from the server until you click the little plus sign to reveal them which would explain the delays and randomness.
I say again, I don't actually know how the implementation works, but I get the impression that the discussion system was coded for Firefox. I for one welcome our new overlords, just like the old overlords.
On a brighter note, I recommend you play with the mouse gestures in opera. You can do some cool tricks by combining operations under one gesture, for example:
GestureUp: Enter fullscreen | Leave fullscreen
will put opera into fullscreen mode, or if for some reason that fails (like it's already fullscreen) it will leave fullscreen mode. Read the | as OR.
I also really like
GestureUp, GestureLeft: Switch to previous page [previous tab, that is]
GestureDown, GestureLeft: Close page, 1 & Switch to previous page
- and their opposites for 'next page'. Combined with middle clicking to open links in a new tab it makes browsing a breeze, since it cuts out most of the clicking on little buttons on toolbars.
Convergent evolution is very well established though. Consider dolphins and sharks - their common ancestors are further back than when pre-dolphins started living in the water, but both have developed similar hydrodynamic shapes and move through the water by wriggling their bodies. The most interesting bit is that although both creatures move using the same principles, sharks wriggle side-to-side while dolphins wriggle up-down. It is reasonable to expect that useful adaptations will be developed independantly since there are only a few good solutions to most problems.
Eyes are another good example - they've been independantly developed several times, but there are only a couple of sensible ways to make them so unrelated eyes still usually look the same. Not always of course, I think octopi use a pinhole camera eye rather than a lens eye.
Are you sure? I tried wearing one on my finger like a ring, but it didn't turn me invisible or make me into a wraith or anything. Perhaps you mean they're forged of pure stupid? ;)
I agree wholeheartedly! It's great to see that Microsoft business tools don't need the user to bend over backwards any more. Pretty much the opposite, in fact...
I disagree. Microsoft has been losing pagerank in their traditional stronghold areas. It's not a crisis yet, but I can see why they'd want to do some preventative maintenance on their Google reputation. For example, this traditional Microsoft meme doesn't return a microsoft.com page in the first half dozen pages of results any more, although there are still a lot of people talking about Microsoft. It seems like they're becoming less relevant in some of their traditional areas of strength.
Nothing wrong with that - if it's a token of your intention to divorce. "Here honey, I got this for you. It matches the inky blackness of your heart." ;)
Are you implying that being a 'spender' causes you to be lower class? It's hard not to be when your income is the same as your fixed living costs.