We know these people can build spaceships, satellites, killer cameras. But can they build a web server that can handle thousands of users requesting those 24meg MPEGs at once?
1. We're a product of evolution.
2. Evolution is natural.
3. We're part of nature.
4. What nature does is natural.
5. If nature wants to wire eels up to robots and send nuclear powered rockets to jupiter, that's natural.
It's all a bunch of bullshit. When's the last time you saw a lion asking permission before ripping in to a nice juicy Springbok? Do cats care that they're destroying the Australian ecosystem? Do locusts care when they destroy some area of whatever type of environment they eat? No, not one bit. At least we have some degree of foresight. That's a lot better than nature does herself.
Yes, I think you do have a right to kill small, irresponsible children. Up to the end of the second trimester.
Anything that can make its displeasure known deserves some rights. "Some rights" means not being tortured for fun. It doesn't mean letting people die because we're unwilling to kill a few hundred million rats in research labs.
If, as PETA would like us to, we all killed ourselves right now, guess what? All life on earth would be destroyed in a few billion years. If we strip mine the solar system to get the fuck out of here? Well, then we have a chance.
Why don't you go read that book you link to? It's about not pushing your pig-headed morality on others.
Well look, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Substitute "cyborgs" for "omelets" and "feeding electrical current into the disembodied brains of people with poor medical insurance who would otherwise have died, until they wear out" for "breaking a few eggs" and you get the idea.
I'd really dig being a cyborg. Maybe I can just plug my head into my computer when I have work to do, and send my body with a simple electronic brain out the gym while I'm busy.
Eels are members of the kingdom animalia, so they are animals in the scientific meaning of the word, but the normal english meaning doesn't necessarily include them. Or, at least one of the normal English meanings doesn't include them. My webster's gives "mammal" as one of the meanings of animal. I can also see meanings that include all land animals (birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians) to the exclusion of fish.
If I tell you a dog is not a fish, you'd think I was on crack. If I tell you a whale is not a fish, you'd think I was telling you something that you already knew. "If a whale were not a fish, no one would feel the need to say it isn't" (my english professor booth). So English allows that whales are fish. Hebrew allows (or did) that bats are birds.
But anyway, I must be off, so that I can go register petdeb.org.
I'm hoping someone old enough to actually remember it could tell me whether Reds was less derogatory then. I can't see a newspaper printing "Reds" today. Is this because the use of the world has changed, or because the early 60s was just a weird time?
For a specific example, in Everquest (which isn't top of the line in terms of realism), all the trees are the same, or one of a fixed set. Why not fractally generate the trees as you go? Store height, breadth, orientation, style, and a seed to generate it from. Voila, your forest doesn't look fake anymore.
There's no reason any objects should actually be stored as 3d models in a game. Everything should be based off a model, but perturbed slightly, so that it looks more like the real world. Of course, if you have to store 300 models in memory to display 300 trees, rather than just one, it's going to eat a lot of memory.
The point is that new methods of creating the content are needed. It is no longer feasible for someone to draw every pixel of the texture for the wolf's coat. Just store it as "hair" and have it generated by your hair generation algorithm, and have your computer (either at "compile" time or at runtime) build a jpg from that.
Want a realistic city? Figure out a model of how cities grow, run that to get the locations of buildings, businesses, and so on, then have something else to build a building of the size indicated in one of the styles you have coded.
So tell me, why are the artists drawing the walls, rather than just taking a map and saying, "this passageway is covered with moss at the density indicated by this overlay"?
Why would I want good AI? The whole point of porn is that it's for those who don't know how to deal with the real thing. What, now my porn is going to say "sorry, you're an arrogant jerk. I'm going home"?
I want that thing to come with a users' manual. I want it to behave predictably. When I complement her eyes, I want her stipping right on the spot, not realistically telling me that I'm a pathetic loser and she'd have to be a hell of a lot drunker than she is to get with me.
The issue is not primarily whether the government attempts to gather information about us. The issue is that the government can compel you to give them information. If I do not like the fact that my credit card company sells identifiable information about me, I can change to a different credit card company. If someone from the government knocks on my door every ten years and says, "I'm from the government. What is you race? Your religion? Do you have trouble bathing by yourself?" (real question from the long form) I do not have the option to switch to a different census company.
A worse example of this is a recent proposal that medical records (including psychiatrists' notes) would be open to government agents without a warrant. Well, just go switch to a different government.
There is also the separate issue of how the government uses the information. When Amtrack opens up their customer database to the FBI for a cut of the value of the seizures (to catch drug dealers), the FBI is violating the fourth amendment because paying cash for a rail ticket is not "probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
For the second reason, it's a good idea to restrict the government from even gathering the information, so that they don't misuse it.
An example libertarians like to give of this is the fact that Hitler required registration of guns before things got so bad that people would resist. When he finally outlawed them, the police had a convenient list of who to go around and collect them from.
when the clocks were due to tick over (32 bit 1/4 second counters from 1980 or something) on a bunch of Apollo boxes used in the student run open computing facility in 1997, there was talk of whether they should be shut down during the actual turnover. one suggestion was to just bring them down to single user mode, 'cause who knows if a 10 year old hard disk is actually going to start back up. (last I saw of them, they were being used as a bench in the office. I don't see them in the new lab.)
I seem to remember that Weird Al has to get permission to do things like the star wars version of American Pie, but does not to do things like Fat.
The reason being that Fat is a parody of Michael Jackson's Bad song and video, but the star wars song (don't know real name) is not a parody of Don McLean's American Pie, but just uses that song to parody Star Wars.
From this, MasterCard would have a much tougher time suing over Templeton's response (which is using MasterCard's marketting strategy to parody MasterCard's actions) than they would suing over the initial joke (which used MasterCard's marketing strategy to parody Columbine).
Remember:
system: $1000
cable modem: $45/month
watching jackasses lose their shirts after following legal advice on slashdot: priceless
It's something I don't really get about certain views. It's like a lot of people think they will be infected by the "wrong" views. True story:
I'm at the Berkeley College Republicans' semi-annual riot with a bunch of other libertarians. This time, it's someone speaking against reparations for slavery. One of the groups protesting is the Sparticist league (we're all holding signs that say stuff like "free speech for everyone" and such). One of them is holding a sign that says something like gun control helps "the man" keep black poor. My friend Anthony goes up to talk to him to tell him he agrees with the sign, but someone steps in his way and blocks him. "He doesn't want to talk to you" the guy says. "I wanted to tell him I agree" "He doesn't want to hear what you have to say."
Yeah, I think these are the same types of people who were standing around with "support free speech" signs while burning the republicans literature at their last big riot (on Mumia Abu Jamal).
I think some religious fanatics have similar paranoia about being tainted.
Well, you gotta ask what the eight year old girl was doing in the strip club to begin with.
Children should not be let out to run around the big bad world unescorted. You don't like the radio, or TV, or the internet, don't buy a TV, a radio, or a computer. Don't let your children play with kids whose parents have them. I'm very sorry, but if you want to raise sheltered children, that's your responsibility, not mine. And don't give me that bullshit about you can't watch them all the time. If you aren't wasting money on TV, radio, computers, books, movies, and so on, you got the money to have one parent stay home. You want to pretend the world has the same values you do, you have to go to some trouble.
If it's too much trouble, well, that's just tough shit. It's not my responsibility to listen to bad jokes and circuitous discussions of sex because *you're* a prude. My favorite advice column is Dan Savage. Imagine if someone were to read this over the radio:
If evolution demands every advantage, why am I still spilling my seed in my boyfriend's ass-crack? I mean, I've been doing this a long time. Shouldn't I be itching for those breeding advantages by now, too?
I'm sorry, but dykes aren't chimps, and dykes don't have to run off with men in order to breed. The dyke bonobo who wants kids is stuck; she has to mate with a boy bonobo. Where else is she going to get a load of that hot bonobo spunk?
Point 6 of the report: the courts have approved regulation of broadcast indecency to further the compelling government interests in supporting parental supervision of children, and more generally its concern for children's well being.
Now someone please show me the line in the constitution that says "congress shall have the power to take any actions necessary and proper to providing for children's well being"? Or am I right and all these fucking traitors should be taken out and shot for violating their oaths of office?
Why is it that the FCC thinks sex and shitting are potential areas of speech which may be indecent? Maybe I find the idea of governments blatantly ignoring the law indecent, but don't have a problem with people humorous songs about politicians having sex with 15 year olds (see page 8 of the report). Maybe I think graphic descriptions of war are unsuitable for children, but these standards don't even touch on that. Sorry, not covered, by the underwear, not covered by our taboos.
You gotta love the language of the report too: "our enforcement requires" instead of "we decided". In fact, it's never "we", but rather "the commission". Or maybe "the Commision."
Little shit fascists like you should be sent over to China for a while, where they just go ahead and shoot people for saying stuff they don't like (but not before matching them up with people waiting for the organs!).
I'm not so sure that having a moon says anything about the potential for life, but there is a good argument that life is pretty unlikely to leave the seas without a moon to provide the tides that make the tidal zones that allow gradual evolution from sea animals to land animals.
I see the debris argument, but don't think it's that strong for merely being inhabitable (I wouldn't want to live there, but an occasional 50 meter meteor isn't going to hurt the ecosystem). I don't see why a moon is needed to stabilize the axis -- Mars would be perfect for life, if it were twice the size and closer to the sun, and it doesn't have a large moon.
Praise the Lord! At last my hard core symbolic logic skills will lead me to the top. Some may say that taking five separate classes that require you to prove De Morgan's laws is pointless, but who will be laughing, when ALL our programs look fleets of 1950's rocket ships?
Actually, I suppose we'll all be laughing. But I'll be laughing more than the others.
"Global Regular Expression Parser" sounds like a ret con'd acronym. It actually stands for the ed command form g/RE/p where RE is a regular expression. I don't think ping is a real acronym. I would guess that the word comes from the sound sonar equipment makes.
Oh, an FPGA is essentially a piece of hardware that can be programmed to simulate another piece of hardware. Wait, that didn't come out right. An FPGA is like a blank chip. They are used for prototyping chips and also for implementing things that aren't big enough volume to be worth doing in real silicon. They're faster than software, but slower than dedicated hardware. You could implement a Pentium in a set of FPGAs, but it wouldn't be running at 1 gigahertz. It would be faster than a software simulation, though.
Very good point. Of course, if the GPL is intended to be interpretted to be compatible with the OSD, I think they'd almost (but not quite) have to allow for an ISO to be merely a compilation rather than a derived work.
The GPL only applies to the GPL'd code. Nothing is to stop Libranet from including non-GPL code on the distribution. If Libranet includes something which they have an exclusive license to (it could even be a poem by the CEO's daughter), then they can prohibit you from redistributing that.
You are, of course, free to take the GPL'd programs and make your own ISO, but you cannot necessarily redistribute their ISO.
3.1.2 - Does OpenBSD provide an ISO image available for download?
You can't. The official OpenBSD CD-ROM layout is copyright Theo de
Raadt, as an incentive for people to buy the CD set. Note that only
the layout is copyrighted, OpenBSD itself is free. Nothing precludes
someone else to just grab OpenBSD and make their own CD.
Of course, OpenBSD isn't under the GPL, but the same thing would seem to apply. The location of the files, or the release notes, or whatever, is not a derived work from GPL'd code, so it doesn't have to be redistributable.
The iso may contain copyrighted stuff that you do not have a license to redistribute. Maybe it's as little as a "thanks for buying xxx distro" readme. That's enough to mean you can't redistribute it.
The OpenBSD ISO images are copyrighted. It's a way to bring in a little money. Someone else could make a new one, but it's more trouble than the bare bones duplicaters like cheapbytes.com want to go through.
Hehe. One would logically assuem so, but how do you plan on delivering open source content when Windows XP refuses to run anything that isn't signed by someone with a certificate signed by micirosoft (or anyone who has a copy of MS' certficate, which isn't as exclusive a group as it used to be).
The encryption is useless from a security standpoint, because the keys are stored locally. It may take hardware monitoring devices to get it out, but you can bet that large government agencies like the FBI, the NSA, and, of course, the COS, will have the ability to read whatever you have.
I'm so glad that brain dead liberals are willing to sacrifice their freedom if it happens to force their views on someone else. It makes me doubly confident that my plan to take over the world will encounter no resistance.
Graph Isomorphism and Factoring are two problems which are neither known to be NP-Complete, nor is any poly time algorithm known for either. I know factoring is in both NP and Co-NP (a certificate can be generated to show that a number has no factors less than n, but don't ask me how). Is there any relation between these two problems? By the "what's clean and elegant is probably true" method of proof, it seems like these should be equivalent. Is graph isomorphism in Co-NP? It seems like it might be possible to generate some certificate that here's some property one of the graphs has but not the other that it might be.
One problem I see with trying to show them equivalent is that one problem takes two graphs, and the other takes a number and an upper bound on the size of the factor (or just a number if you are checking for primality). This makes it difficult to imagine a reduction.
[if you want to mod people down for off-topic, do the one this is a reply to]
The live aids vaccine issue is easy -- let people decide for themselves. Yes, it's an amazingly difficult question for someone to say, "should we give this vaccine to everyone in sub-saharan africa", but it is no one's place to make that decision. The question should be, should we make this available to those who are aware of the risk and conclude that they would like to have it. The answer is clearly yes.
I would not consider it worth the risk -- I'm not an IV drug user, I'm straight, and I'm not promiscuous (admittedly, the last one isn't really by choice). If I were a heroin addict who frequented sex clubs in San Francisco, it might be worth the risk to me.
Unlike with the polio vaccine, you don't even need parents to make the decision for their children -- anyone old enough to need to worry about getting AIDS is old enough to evaluate their options.
You may not approve of which option they choose, many people may be poorly informed, but it is the epitome of arrogance to believe that some ethics board has the prerogative to decide whether someone should be allowed access to what may save their life.
1. It's entirely plausible -- you can get a good approximation with only a few hundred multiplications per pixel. That a 13th century monk would think of it, not too plausible.
2. The bit about "disputing the bible's claim that pi = 3" really ruins the plausibility. No one except atheists trying to disprove the bible has ever claimed that the bible says pi = 3. It says there was a lake 30 cubits around and 10 across. Maybe St. John the Mushroom Head thought that "I saw a molten lake of fire 30 cubits around and nine and five hundred forty-nine thousanths cubits across" didn't fit the meter very well. Overall, the bit about pi should just be rewritten to make it more plausible.
3. profanus et animi is great: Material vs. Spiritual. Or maybe better translated as Real and Imaginary.
4. Fractals don't have "infinite detail" anymore than x*x + y*y 4 has infinite detail. Yes, you can keep bumping up the resolution, but the information content is totally captured in the equation generating it. (i.e. fractal image compression isn't magic.)
5. The update that this is a hoax should be removed from the summary so that people have an opportunaty to fall for it before they read the comments.
Slashdot Mirror
We know these people can build spaceships, satellites, killer cameras. But can they build a web server that can handle thousands of users requesting those 24meg MPEGs at once?
1. We're a product of evolution.
2. Evolution is natural.
3. We're part of nature.
4. What nature does is natural.
5. If nature wants to wire eels up to robots and send nuclear powered rockets to jupiter, that's natural.
It's all a bunch of bullshit. When's the last time you saw a lion asking permission before ripping in to a nice juicy Springbok? Do cats care that they're destroying the Australian ecosystem? Do locusts care when they destroy some area of whatever type of environment they eat? No, not one bit. At least we have some degree of foresight. That's a lot better than nature does herself.
Yes, I think you do have a right to kill small, irresponsible children. Up to the end of the second trimester.
Anything that can make its displeasure known deserves some rights. "Some rights" means not being tortured for fun. It doesn't mean letting people die because we're unwilling to kill a few hundred million rats in research labs.
If, as PETA would like us to, we all killed ourselves right now, guess what? All life on earth would be destroyed in a few billion years. If we strip mine the solar system to get the fuck out of here? Well, then we have a chance.
Why don't you go read that book you link to? It's about not pushing your pig-headed morality on others.
Well look, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Substitute "cyborgs" for "omelets" and "feeding electrical current into the disembodied brains of people with poor medical insurance who would otherwise have died, until they wear out" for "breaking a few eggs" and you get the idea.
I'd really dig being a cyborg. Maybe I can just plug my head into my computer when I have work to do, and send my body with a simple electronic brain out the gym while I'm busy.
Eels are members of the kingdom animalia, so they are animals in the scientific meaning of the word, but the normal english meaning doesn't necessarily include them. Or, at least one of the normal English meanings doesn't include them. My webster's gives "mammal" as one of the meanings of animal. I can also see meanings that include all land animals (birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians) to the exclusion of fish.
If I tell you a dog is not a fish, you'd think I was on crack. If I tell you a whale is not a fish, you'd think I was telling you something that you already knew. "If a whale were not a fish, no one would feel the need to say it isn't" (my english professor booth). So English allows that whales are fish. Hebrew allows (or did) that bats are birds.
But anyway, I must be off, so that I can go register petdeb.org.
I'm hoping someone old enough to actually remember it could tell me whether Reds was less derogatory then. I can't see a newspaper printing "Reds" today. Is this because the use of the world has changed, or because the early 60s was just a weird time?
Same reason I misspelled cojones as cajones in my .sig a while back -- because rediculous is slightly closer to many people's pronounciation.
But just remember the handy mnemonic:
If you don't want to be an object of ridicule, look up the spelling of the damn word.
For a specific example, in Everquest (which isn't top of the line in terms of realism), all the trees are the same, or one of a fixed set. Why not fractally generate the trees as you go? Store height, breadth, orientation, style, and a seed to generate it from. Voila, your forest doesn't look fake anymore.
There's no reason any objects should actually be stored as 3d models in a game. Everything should be based off a model, but perturbed slightly, so that it looks more like the real world. Of course, if you have to store 300 models in memory to display 300 trees, rather than just one, it's going to eat a lot of memory.
The point is that new methods of creating the content are needed. It is no longer feasible for someone to draw every pixel of the texture for the wolf's coat. Just store it as "hair" and have it generated by your hair generation algorithm, and have your computer (either at "compile" time or at runtime) build a jpg from that.
Want a realistic city? Figure out a model of how cities grow, run that to get the locations of buildings, businesses, and so on, then have something else to build a building of the size indicated in one of the styles you have coded.
So tell me, why are the artists drawing the walls, rather than just taking a map and saying, "this passageway is covered with moss at the density indicated by this overlay"?
Why would I want good AI? The whole point of porn is that it's for those who don't know how to deal with the real thing. What, now my porn is going to say "sorry, you're an arrogant jerk. I'm going home"?
I want that thing to come with a users' manual. I want it to behave predictably. When I complement her eyes, I want her stipping right on the spot, not realistically telling me that I'm a pathetic loser and she'd have to be a hell of a lot drunker than she is to get with me.
The issue is not primarily whether the government attempts to gather information about us. The issue is that the government can compel you to give them information. If I do not like the fact that my credit card company sells identifiable information about me, I can change to a different credit card company. If someone from the government knocks on my door every ten years and says, "I'm from the government. What is you race? Your religion? Do you have trouble bathing by yourself?" (real question from the long form) I do not have the option to switch to a different census company.
A worse example of this is a recent proposal that medical records (including psychiatrists' notes) would be open to government agents without a warrant. Well, just go switch to a different government.
There is also the separate issue of how the government uses the information. When Amtrack opens up their customer database to the FBI for a cut of the value of the seizures (to catch drug dealers), the FBI is violating the fourth amendment because paying cash for a rail ticket is not "probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
For the second reason, it's a good idea to restrict the government from even gathering the information, so that they don't misuse it.
An example libertarians like to give of this is the fact that Hitler required registration of guns before things got so bad that people would resist. When he finally outlawed them, the police had a convenient list of who to go around and collect them from.
--Kevin
when the clocks were due to tick over (32 bit 1/4 second counters from 1980 or something) on a bunch of Apollo boxes used in the student run open computing facility in 1997, there was talk of whether they should be shut down during the actual turnover. one suggestion was to just bring them down to single user mode, 'cause who knows if a 10 year old hard disk is actually going to start back up. (last I saw of them, they were being used as a bench in the office. I don't see them in the new lab.)
I seem to remember that Weird Al has to get permission to do things like the star wars version of American Pie, but does not to do things like Fat.
The reason being that Fat is a parody of Michael Jackson's Bad song and video, but the star wars song (don't know real name) is not a parody of Don McLean's American Pie, but just uses that song to parody Star Wars.
From this, MasterCard would have a much tougher time suing over Templeton's response (which is using MasterCard's marketting strategy to parody MasterCard's actions) than they would suing over the initial joke (which used MasterCard's marketing strategy to parody Columbine).
Remember:
system: $1000
cable modem: $45/month
watching jackasses lose their shirts after following legal advice on slashdot: priceless
Oh, whoops. No one around here pronounces it correctly, so I didn't know the spelling. I think I deleted it anyway.
It's something I don't really get about certain views. It's like a lot of people think they will be infected by the "wrong" views. True story:
I'm at the Berkeley College Republicans' semi-annual riot with a bunch of other libertarians. This time, it's someone speaking against reparations for slavery. One of the groups protesting is the Sparticist league (we're all holding signs that say stuff like "free speech for everyone" and such). One of them is holding a sign that says something like gun control helps "the man" keep black poor. My friend Anthony goes up to talk to him to tell him he agrees with the sign, but someone steps in his way and blocks him. "He doesn't want to talk to you" the guy says. "I wanted to tell him I agree" "He doesn't want to hear what you have to say."
Yeah, I think these are the same types of people who were standing around with "support free speech" signs while burning the republicans literature at their last big riot (on Mumia Abu Jamal).
I think some religious fanatics have similar paranoia about being tainted.
Children should not be let out to run around the big bad world unescorted. You don't like the radio, or TV, or the internet, don't buy a TV, a radio, or a computer. Don't let your children play with kids whose parents have them. I'm very sorry, but if you want to raise sheltered children, that's your responsibility, not mine. And don't give me that bullshit about you can't watch them all the time. If you aren't wasting money on TV, radio, computers, books, movies, and so on, you got the money to have one parent stay home. You want to pretend the world has the same values you do, you have to go to some trouble.
If it's too much trouble, well, that's just tough shit. It's not my responsibility to listen to bad jokes and circuitous discussions of sex because *you're* a prude. My favorite advice column is Dan Savage. Imagine if someone were to read this over the radio:
Point 6 of the report: the courts have approved regulation of broadcast indecency to further the compelling government interests in supporting parental supervision of children, and more generally its concern for children's well being.
Now someone please show me the line in the constitution that says "congress shall have the power to take any actions necessary and proper to providing for children's well being"? Or am I right and all these fucking traitors should be taken out and shot for violating their oaths of office?
Why is it that the FCC thinks sex and shitting are potential areas of speech which may be indecent? Maybe I find the idea of governments blatantly ignoring the law indecent, but don't have a problem with people humorous songs about politicians having sex with 15 year olds (see page 8 of the report). Maybe I think graphic descriptions of war are unsuitable for children, but these standards don't even touch on that. Sorry, not covered, by the underwear, not covered by our taboos.
You gotta love the language of the report too: "our enforcement requires" instead of "we decided". In fact, it's never "we", but rather "the commission". Or maybe "the Commision."
Little shit fascists like you should be sent over to China for a while, where they just go ahead and shoot people for saying stuff they don't like (but not before matching them up with people waiting for the organs!).
I'm not so sure that having a moon says anything about the potential for life, but there is a good argument that life is pretty unlikely to leave the seas without a moon to provide the tides that make the tidal zones that allow gradual evolution from sea animals to land animals.
I see the debris argument, but don't think it's that strong for merely being inhabitable (I wouldn't want to live there, but an occasional 50 meter meteor isn't going to hurt the ecosystem). I don't see why a moon is needed to stabilize the axis -- Mars would be perfect for life, if it were twice the size and closer to the sun, and it doesn't have a large moon.
Praise the Lord! At last my hard core symbolic logic skills will lead me to the top. Some may say that taking five separate classes that require you to prove De Morgan's laws is pointless, but who will be laughing, when ALL our programs look fleets of 1950's rocket ships?
Actually, I suppose we'll all be laughing. But I'll be laughing more than the others.
"Global Regular Expression Parser" sounds like a ret con'd acronym. It actually stands for the ed command form g/RE/p where RE is a regular expression. I don't think ping is a real acronym. I would guess that the word comes from the sound sonar equipment makes.
Oh, an FPGA is essentially a piece of hardware that can be programmed to simulate another piece of hardware. Wait, that didn't come out right. An FPGA is like a blank chip. They are used for prototyping chips and also for implementing things that aren't big enough volume to be worth doing in real silicon. They're faster than software, but slower than dedicated hardware. You could implement a Pentium in a set of FPGAs, but it wouldn't be running at 1 gigahertz. It would be faster than a software simulation, though.
Very good point. Of course, if the GPL is intended to be interpretted to be compatible with the OSD, I think they'd almost (but not quite) have to allow for an ISO to be merely a compilation rather than a derived work.
The GPL only applies to the GPL'd code. Nothing is to stop Libranet from including non-GPL code on the distribution. If Libranet includes something which they have an exclusive license to (it could even be a poem by the CEO's daughter), then they can prohibit you from redistributing that.
You are, of course, free to take the GPL'd programs and make your own ISO, but you cannot necessarily redistribute their ISO.
Consider this from http://www.openbsd.org/faq/obsd-faq.txt:
3.1.2 - Does OpenBSD provide an ISO image available for download?
You can't. The official OpenBSD CD-ROM layout is copyright Theo de
Raadt, as an incentive for people to buy the CD set. Note that only
the layout is copyrighted, OpenBSD itself is free. Nothing precludes
someone else to just grab OpenBSD and make their own CD.
Of course, OpenBSD isn't under the GPL, but the same thing would seem to apply. The location of the files, or the release notes, or whatever, is not a derived work from GPL'd code, so it doesn't have to be redistributable.
The iso may contain copyrighted stuff that you do not have a license to redistribute. Maybe it's as little as a "thanks for buying xxx distro" readme. That's enough to mean you can't redistribute it.
The OpenBSD ISO images are copyrighted. It's a way to bring in a little money. Someone else could make a new one, but it's more trouble than the bare bones duplicaters like cheapbytes.com want to go through.
Hehe. One would logically assuem so, but how do you plan on delivering open source content when Windows XP refuses to run anything that isn't signed by someone with a certificate signed by micirosoft (or anyone who has a copy of MS' certficate, which isn't as exclusive a group as it used to be).
The encryption is useless from a security standpoint, because the keys are stored locally. It may take hardware monitoring devices to get it out, but you can bet that large government agencies like the FBI, the NSA, and, of course, the COS, will have the ability to read whatever you have.
I'm so glad that brain dead liberals are willing to sacrifice their freedom if it happens to force their views on someone else. It makes me doubly confident that my plan to take over the world will encounter no resistance.
Graph Isomorphism and Factoring are two problems which are neither known to be NP-Complete, nor is any poly time algorithm known for either. I know factoring is in both NP and Co-NP (a certificate can be generated to show that a number has no factors less than n, but don't ask me how). Is there any relation between these two problems? By the "what's clean and elegant is probably true" method of proof, it seems like these should be equivalent. Is graph isomorphism in Co-NP? It seems like it might be possible to generate some certificate that here's some property one of the graphs has but not the other that it might be.
One problem I see with trying to show them equivalent is that one problem takes two graphs, and the other takes a number and an upper bound on the size of the factor (or just a number if you are checking for primality). This makes it difficult to imagine a reduction.
Thoughts?
If the hoax is yours, fix the image -- it's broken.
[if you want to mod people down for off-topic, do the one this is a reply to]
The live aids vaccine issue is easy -- let people decide for themselves. Yes, it's an amazingly difficult question for someone to say, "should we give this vaccine to everyone in sub-saharan africa", but it is no one's place to make that decision. The question should be, should we make this available to those who are aware of the risk and conclude that they would like to have it. The answer is clearly yes.
I would not consider it worth the risk -- I'm not an IV drug user, I'm straight, and I'm not promiscuous (admittedly, the last one isn't really by choice). If I were a heroin addict who frequented sex clubs in San Francisco, it might be worth the risk to me.
Unlike with the polio vaccine, you don't even need parents to make the decision for their children -- anyone old enough to need to worry about getting AIDS is old enough to evaluate their options.
You may not approve of which option they choose, many people may be poorly informed, but it is the epitome of arrogance to believe that some ethics board has the prerogative to decide whether someone should be allowed access to what may save their life.
1. It's entirely plausible -- you can get a good approximation with only a few hundred multiplications per pixel. That a 13th century monk would think of it, not too plausible.
2. The bit about "disputing the bible's claim that pi = 3" really ruins the plausibility. No one except atheists trying to disprove the bible has ever claimed that the bible says pi = 3. It says there was a lake 30 cubits around and 10 across. Maybe St. John the Mushroom Head thought that "I saw a molten lake of fire 30 cubits around and nine and five hundred forty-nine thousanths cubits across" didn't fit the meter very well. Overall, the bit about pi should just be rewritten to make it more plausible.
3. profanus et animi is great: Material vs. Spiritual. Or maybe better translated as Real and Imaginary.
4. Fractals don't have "infinite detail" anymore than x*x + y*y 4 has infinite detail. Yes, you can keep bumping up the resolution, but the information content is totally captured in the equation generating it. (i.e. fractal image compression isn't magic.)
5. The update that this is a hoax should be removed from the summary so that people have an opportunaty to fall for it before they read the comments.