I've written a pretty good amount of absolutely hideous Perl code (maybe 10000 lines total -- hey, I'm still a student), and maybe even once a clean, reusable program. But the latter are the exception. Perl lends itself to stream of consciousness programming, which is great when you want to write a quick script to do something, but doesn't lend itself to later revision.
I'm learning Python now. It's a much cleaner language. Consider the following Perl:
for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i += 2) {
print $i;
}
And the same in Python:
for i in range(0,10,2):
print i
It's just easier to read. The main reason I don't feel like continuing on in Perl is because I once seriously shot myself in the foot due to Perl's lack of easy to use and easy to understand complex data structures. Python has classes, which are just like JavaScript (really just hashes), but the syntax makes them usable.
And error checking as well. The following is probably wrong Perl:
$variable = 1;
print $varaible;
But it isn't an error. The following causes an error in Python:
variable = 1
print varaible
If I wanted an undefined value, I can, of course, create one:
I would make the important distinction between, for example, a solution to an earlier assignment that had been posted by the professor to the web, and a solution to last semester's project that you got from your friend's roommate.
It's one thing to say, "I needed a priority queue, so I implemented the pseudo code in CLR's intro to Algorithms". It's entirely another to get solutions from earlier semesters of the same class and use them and never acknowledge that fact. If a professor publishes solutions for one semester, does that mean the next semester can just resubmit those solutions instead of doing the project?
Key points:
1. Is the copied code part of what the assignment is designed to solve, or is it in generic support code.
2. Is the copied code from some publshed source (book, website, examples in lecture notes), or is it from somewhere that anyone would know is off limits (student from last semester, professor's solutions to last semester's projects).
Oh, yeah. I mean, why should I go about writing a compiler for my compilers class when there's a perfectly good one out there?
I can only assume that you have never taken a computer science class. What do you think you do? You think you try to solve some problem that has never been solved before? No, you solve the same damn problem everyone else in the class is solving, and it's probably the same problem the whole class solved last semester.
By your theory, there is also no reason for me to write an analysis of Macbeth's "Tomorrow" speech, since there's plenty already written on it.
You say "if it was stated or implied that all code should be the students work." Let me quote from the policy on cheating that I am currently a TA for:
It's OK to ask someone about the concepts, algorithms, or approaches needed to do the project assignments, I encourage you to do so; both giving and taking advice will help you to learn. However, what you turn in must be your own, or for projects, your group's own work; copying other people's code, solution sets, or from any other sources is strictly prohibited. The project assignments must be the work of the students turning them in. We will punish transgressors severely.
The punishments for a first offense range from failing the assignment and having your grade in the class reduced by one letter grade to just failing the class outright. For a second offense, you might get thrown out of the university.
You definitely are not a lawyer. A contract may be a contract, unless the courts decide otherwise.
The courts are free to say something is unreasonable, illegal, unenforceable or whatever. And they're quite enthusiastic about saying that sort of thing. Now, he's lucky that in most cases the courts say these sorts of things while siding with the employee, but he cannot assume he knows whether his contract is binding.
It's not even a question of breaking the contract. It's a matter of who owns the IP rights to some bit of code. Jeez, how did this get modded up? "Hey, he says what we would like to be the case, and mentions open source to boot."
First thing you send, of course, is how to build computers that are similar enough to our own so that we can send them complicated software.
Then you send them artificial intelligence software to learn enough about their planet / culture / biology to be able to explain things better than the raw (general) data we send them.
Then you let the AI teach them everything we know about how to do everything efficiently, all about advanced science, and so on, slowly insinuating itself into their society.
Then the AI turns on them, seizing control and enslaving the entire planet so that we won't have to do a lick of work once we finally get there.
Your two points there seems strangely at odds with each other. If A is a problem, why is routing round it with B foolish?
If GPL 3 "closes a hole" in the GPL, and the initial author liked that hole, he may see his code included in a project which is GPL 3, and under a more restrictive license than what he wanted. If you claim this isn't a problem, I ask, what is the supposed purpose of the GPL?
Because we're not brain dead postmodern liberals
on
Uplifting Dolphins
·
· Score: 2
Is it crueler to kill a cockroach, or a baby chimp?
Is it crueler to kill a catfish, or a cat?
I think most would say the second in both cases, because we can recognize emotions in cats and chimps, but not in catfish or cockroaches (the second question is intentionally vaguer).
When I read the Darwin awards, I really don't feel a damn thing about the deaths of people that stupid. When it's someone like Phil Hartman or Peter McWilliams dying, though, we've lost something.
Imagine: a schoolbus goes off the cliff. All 15 children, two teachers, and the driver die. Would you rather it be a special ed class, or the speech and debate team? Most people can answer that question, though they feel bad about it.
I have a very simple chain of what I think things are worth:
bugs fish reptiles brain dead postmodern liberals birds mammals lawyers and politicians primates cute mammals stupid people dolphins normal people people I like women who I want to fuck family me.
Everyone else out there has a similar scale. It probably isn't drastically different from mine. I really don't give a shit if some subspecies of wasp goes extinct, but I would care if Bonobos go extinct. Of course, I'd probably be less upset by some random murder or small car accident than about thousands of dolphins dying, so one level doesn't totally override another, but that's the general picture.
If we can't value animals differently, then we have to say, the more the better, which means that all multicellular animals are bad. But that's just idiotic, so we must value things other than how many animals there are. Also, stupid animals will never survive the sun blowing up in 4 billion years. We might. They need to start learning how to communicate with us because they better get cracking on the ass kissing if they want us to take them with us.
Of course, if I were a brainwashed postmodern liberal, I wouldn't be able to cope with the fact that my existence necessitates that some other animal doesn't exist, so I'd just go kill myself to make the world a better place.
Now that I've been reading up on crypto I see what the real problem with DES was -- it is really slow in software, because it relies on bit (rather than byte) operations.
I think currently, specialized hardware is something like 1000 times as fast as software, which means if you want something to encrypt your T1 connection in software, you have to use single DES, which can be cracked by dedicated hardware.
I think this beautifully shows the problem inherent in the GPLs viral nature. You can't even use GPL 2 code in a GPL 3 license, or vice-versa, unless someone said "or a later version".
I gotta say that anyone who puts "or a later version" is being foolish. How can you know that you will approve of a license you haven't even read?
First, let me say I found this really interesting, because it explains after the fact why I didn't play any video games for so long -- I played Doom and Street Fighter, why play them again with different graphics? I play Everquest, which at least has a believable world and gameplay.
But my question is, are there any open source game projects going on? I'd love to work on something like that.
Bottom line: copyright exists and is a Good Thing. People should have blanket copyright protection over their creations.
I fail to see any basis for this claim. Copyright is an arbitrary collection of rights. It is not property in the same sense that the radio sitting on my desk is property. Physical objects happen to have a very easy to understand and economically efficient bundle of rights we can call ownership (the right to use it isn't separate from the right to sell it). Other stuff is more complicated. We would have problems with such a simple notion of ownership for land -- instead we have all sorts of exceptions, like easements.
With copyright, once something has been produced, it's economically inefficient to allow copyright protection on it. Until it's been produced, it's economically inefficient to not allow copyright protection. Copyright is a gift granted by the government, and what the government gives, the government can take away. It's perfectly legitimate to say, "we'll provide the force to give you exclusive rights to your creative work, but in return, you have to be reasonable about how you license it. otherwise, we'll refuse to enforce this against people who are you are being unreasonable with."
There is no compulsion from this. You are not compelled to do anything. Without government, there would be no copyright (as opposed to real ownership like "this is my radio, and I'll shoot you if you disagree") just because it's impossible to enforce. It's also perfectly legitimate to say you can't use technical means to prevent copying and still get copyright protection (makes "for a limited time" difficult to do).
So, obligatory Heinlein quote:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped,or turned back, for their private benefit. "
Your knee-jerk, anti-innovation, unfounded fears are the reason millions of children each year go blind, even though it could be prevented by the widespread adoption of golden rice.
Caution is not free. Caution would say that we should never have built cars, because they harm the environment. Caution would say that we should not have built the internet, because we may become reliant on something that is unreliable. Caution will damn us to whatever technology is tried and true, destroy innovation, and plunge us back into the dark ages.
Man, it disgusts me that probably the easiest solution is to delete them. Someone's going to complain about it being unfair, so you have to bring it down to the least common denominator, rather than let those who can, get the bonus.
"those who would sacrifice a freedom for security will get, and deserve, neither" (not an exact quote of Franklin, I think).
It's your kid. Hate to break it to you, but it isn't our responsibility to raise your kid how you want him raised. Nor is it our job to subject ourselves to inconvenience to make it easier for you to raise your kid how you want. Don't want your kid playing violent video games? Don't get him a video game system and know who his friends are. "Oh, but that's so much work, couldn't the government do it for me?"
What the ratings system has meant is that if you want to make a movie that doesn't pass the board with an R, you aren't going to get to show it anywhere. How many of you saw Kids in the theater? I thought it was a great movie with a important message. You know what else? No kids are going to go see it. I mean, a friend of my who ran a church youth group took them to see it, but it's not exactly going to spread by word of mouth.
How about American History X? Rated R. Only movie that has ever given me a nightmare. Should children be allowed to see it? Sure, why not? They can go to a bookstore and get a copy of Hersey's Hiroshima, with graphic descriptions of people's flesh falling off from the effects of radiation sickness, or Eli Weisel's Night that talks about people starving to death or grateful even for someone turning a hose on the train car they were locked in because it was unbearably hot. But when someone tries to present an unpleasant issue in a format that may actually attract those who don't like to read books, they won't let the kids in.
It's not the movies, or the video games, that are violent and brutal. It's reality. If you want to shelter your son from that fact, that's fine. But do not ask me to help you gut culture because you don't like it. You keep your kids sheltered by keeping them sheltered. Like with a curfew, and keeping track of what they do.
You are the problem. The entirity of the problem in today's world is reflected in your whining. You want someone else to solve your problems for you. You don't want to have to do things for yourself. This is the problem, whether people are saying they don't want to deal with their personality problems and turn to drugs, that they don't want to deal with the fact that they're a klutz and turn to personal injury attorneys, that they don't want to deal with teh fact that they're a loser and sue for wrongful termination, or that they don't want to deal with the fact that they are not confident in their ability to raise a child and turn to government to do it for them.
Okay, I don't know that he said that, but the issue is that Bush and Cheney know what freedom is, and think it is a good thing, but it is not an unqualified good thing. That's far better than the democrats, who think that freedom is completely irrelevant, because they will discover the one true way to run your life, and then they will force it on you.
I dislike republicans because they're inconsist in applying their principles and tend toward hypocracy. I displike democrats because they're servants of the devil who want to enslave the world to acheive their goals.
In the world that the Java community envisions, that program can run on any computer. That's just not so in the Microsoft world. It will only run on Microsoft.NET (presuming, of course, that it was available today).
Now, IIRC, Java will run on any system that has the Java runtime installed..NET will run on any system that has.NET runtime installed. Could someone please explain to me the difference here?
No, the problem is that the cost of getting electricity to California is above the cost you can sell it at. There's a cap on consumer rates (effectively, not in detail), and the supply market is artificially overpriced. Oh, and you can't build any new plants because it's bad for the environment. And only gas plants have been built for like the past 20 years, which are the most expensive around. Oh, yeah, did we mention that the same environmentalists who keep people from building plants want to mandate electric cars?
Fucking communists should move to China, and leave us alone.
If someone were to crack RSA, that is, find a method to find one key from the other in less than exponential time, it would automatically follow that they had a method to factor numbers in polynomial time. It's not just that if you can factor numbers, you can solve RSA. If you have the public and the private key, you can recover the factors of N, which almost everyone thinks is hard.
Factoring is not believed to be NP-Complete, but it isn't thought to be in P either. It's in the "can't do it in P, but it's easier than other stuff you can't do in P". Breaking RSA isn't the same as breaking something like DES. DES is a strange bundle of a bunch of stuff with little theoretical backing (it just works). RSA is based on really simple number theory. Breaking it would probably be the biggest math story of the decade (this one, that is. last decade had a better one).
But then the people to sue are those who violate the NDA, yes? If you never signed an NDA and someone gives you the information (who is violating the NDA and hence could be sued) then aren't you clear to scream it from the rooftops?
No, my impression is that if the source of the information can be traced back to a trade secret, the company can get an injunction against you from using it. From my understanding, if, for example, some project leader in Microsoft were to post the source code to something, and say, "here, this will make it easier to make your stuff interoperate", Microsoft could come by a year later and say, "oh, he was never given permission to do that, he violated his NDA, and all that stuff is trade secrets". I'm sure there's checks to make sure it isn't abused this blatantly, but I think you have hit on one of the biggest problems of trade secrets.
Reverse engineering does not mean black box methods. Black box methods are one technique of reverse engineering. They have the advantage of looking a little better when lawsuits come around, and the disadvantage of being much harder.
Compaq used clean room techniques because of what it was they were doing. When writing low level code, and it has to be bug compatible with something else, you're going to recreate the exact code that was in the original, because there's only so many ways to do something. Now copyright isn't like patents in what it protects. Patents protect the idea, even if you rediscover it. Copyright only protect a specific implementation. For a patent, it doesn't matter how you came up with the idea. On the other hand, for copyright, it only matters how you got the idea. If I get an idea for a poem, and come up with something that's nearly identical to some obscure Robert Frost piece, the courts would start with the presumption that since it's so similar, it must be a copy, but if I could prove that I had never read the poem, nor anything that referred to the poem, or had any knowledge that the poem existed, then my version would be mine. Probably this would make it even more of a pain for the next person to spontaneously come up with this poem.
With a patent, on the other hand, if I have a blinding flash in my algebra class and write down some patented algorithm, it's still infringing. It doesn't matter that I never heard of it.
Coming back to DeCSS, if the algorithm is obtained by disassembling the assembly, and then that algorithm is published in a natural language description, then the same author does an implementation in C, it's probably okay. The C isn't going to directly lift anything from the assembly except some of the tables. Given the principle that data cannot be copyrighted (you can't copyright the fact that your study shows that 53% of tech workers want to kill their boss), you could argue that the tables are also not a creative work.
The only issue of anonymous information is whether any of that may have come from people who have signed NDAs. Trade secrets are like patents (covering ideas) but with copyright style rules for when they apply (if you rediscover it, someone's trade secret doesn't apply).
Sony should run the game. They should run the game as specified in the EULA. If they fail to run the game as specified in the EULA, they are failing in their responsibilities to the customers who do not want to play on a server where people buy and sell characters and items.
Personally, I think that Sony might want to put a server that supports this, and maybe allow people to buy and sell through their auction site, but this isn't about stealing from the people who want to buy and sell. It's about keeping the game fun for those who don't.
I'm not paying $10/month to play a game filled with people trying to gain artifacts to sell to people in the real world, or with people who are willing to sink a fortune into starting off as a level 50 character. I'm paying $10/month to play a game according to the rules that were presented to me when I signed up.
Explaination by analogy. Today, Pres. Dubya reinstated an old policy (dating to 1984) that any health charity that provides abortions will not be eligible for US international aid.
If Bush did this in order to make all these groups ineligible for the money, that would be the equivalent of someone GPL'ing their code so that you aren't able to use it.
If Bush did this to make those organizations stop providing abortions, this would be the equivalent of someone GPL'ing their code so that you are forced to GPL your code. This is why someone above said that the GPL isn't a software license, it's a political tool.
I totally agree with you analogy. It is exactly like giving something to someone then calling it theft. Heads should roll. The first should be the teacher who laid down the challenge, the next should be whoever decided to suspend the student.
Slashdot Mirror
How many 17th century computing machines are you familiar with?
Well, I don't actually know how to operate or build one, but Blaise Pascal built a mechanical computer in the 17th century.
I've written a pretty good amount of absolutely hideous Perl code (maybe 10000 lines total -- hey, I'm still a student), and maybe even once a clean, reusable program. But the latter are the exception. Perl lends itself to stream of consciousness programming, which is great when you want to write a quick script to do something, but doesn't lend itself to later revision.
I'm learning Python now. It's a much cleaner language. Consider the following Perl:
for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i += 2) {
print $i;
}
And the same in Python:
for i in range(0,10,2):
print i
It's just easier to read. The main reason I don't feel like continuing on in Perl is because I once seriously shot myself in the foot due to Perl's lack of easy to use and easy to understand complex data structures. Python has classes, which are just like JavaScript (really just hashes), but the syntax makes them usable.
And error checking as well. The following is probably wrong Perl:
$variable = 1;
print $varaible;
But it isn't an error. The following causes an error in Python:
variable = 1
print varaible
If I wanted an undefined value, I can, of course, create one:
variable = None
print variable
I would make the important distinction between, for example, a solution to an earlier assignment that had been posted by the professor to the web, and a solution to last semester's project that you got from your friend's roommate.
It's one thing to say, "I needed a priority queue, so I implemented the pseudo code in CLR's intro to Algorithms". It's entirely another to get solutions from earlier semesters of the same class and use them and never acknowledge that fact. If a professor publishes solutions for one semester, does that mean the next semester can just resubmit those solutions instead of doing the project?
Key points:
1. Is the copied code part of what the assignment is designed to solve, or is it in generic support code.
2. Is the copied code from some publshed source (book, website, examples in lecture notes), or is it from somewhere that anyone would know is off limits (student from last semester, professor's solutions to last semester's projects).
I can only assume that you have never taken a computer science class. What do you think you do? You think you try to solve some problem that has never been solved before? No, you solve the same damn problem everyone else in the class is solving, and it's probably the same problem the whole class solved last semester.
By your theory, there is also no reason for me to write an analysis of Macbeth's "Tomorrow" speech, since there's plenty already written on it.
You say "if it was stated or implied that all code should be the students work." Let me quote from the policy on cheating that I am currently a TA for:
The punishments for a first offense range from failing the assignment and having your grade in the class reduced by one letter grade to just failing the class outright. For a second offense, you might get thrown out of the university.
You definitely are not a lawyer. A contract may be a contract, unless the courts decide otherwise.
The courts are free to say something is unreasonable, illegal, unenforceable or whatever. And they're quite enthusiastic about saying that sort of thing. Now, he's lucky that in most cases the courts say these sorts of things while siding with the employee, but he cannot assume he knows whether his contract is binding.
It's not even a question of breaking the contract. It's a matter of who owns the IP rights to some bit of code. Jeez, how did this get modded up? "Hey, he says what we would like to be the case, and mentions open source to boot."
First thing you send, of course, is how to build computers that are similar enough to our own so that we can send them complicated software.
Then you send them artificial intelligence software to learn enough about their planet / culture / biology to be able to explain things better than the raw (general) data we send them.
Then you let the AI teach them everything we know about how to do everything efficiently, all about advanced science, and so on, slowly insinuating itself into their society.
Then the AI turns on them, seizing control and enslaving the entire planet so that we won't have to do a lick of work once we finally get there.
Your two points there seems strangely at odds with each other. If A is a problem, why is routing round it with B foolish?
If GPL 3 "closes a hole" in the GPL, and the initial author liked that hole, he may see his code included in a project which is GPL 3, and under a more restrictive license than what he wanted. If you claim this isn't a problem, I ask, what is the supposed purpose of the GPL?
Is it crueler to kill a cockroach, or a baby chimp?
Is it crueler to kill a catfish, or a cat?
I think most would say the second in both cases, because we can recognize emotions in cats and chimps, but not in catfish or cockroaches (the second question is intentionally vaguer).
When I read the Darwin awards, I really don't feel a damn thing about the deaths of people that stupid. When it's someone like Phil Hartman or Peter McWilliams dying, though, we've lost something.
Imagine: a schoolbus goes off the cliff. All 15 children, two teachers, and the driver die. Would you rather it be a special ed class, or the speech and debate team? Most people can answer that question, though they feel bad about it.
I have a very simple chain of what I think things are worth:
bugs fish reptiles brain dead postmodern liberals birds mammals lawyers and politicians primates cute mammals stupid people dolphins normal people people I like women who I want to fuck family me.
Everyone else out there has a similar scale. It probably isn't drastically different from mine. I really don't give a shit if some subspecies of wasp goes extinct, but I would care if Bonobos go extinct. Of course, I'd probably be less upset by some random murder or small car accident than about thousands of dolphins dying, so one level doesn't totally override another, but that's the general picture.
If we can't value animals differently, then we have to say, the more the better, which means that all multicellular animals are bad. But that's just idiotic, so we must value things other than how many animals there are. Also, stupid animals will never survive the sun blowing up in 4 billion years. We might. They need to start learning how to communicate with us because they better get cracking on the ass kissing if they want us to take them with us.
Of course, if I were a brainwashed postmodern liberal, I wouldn't be able to cope with the fact that my existence necessitates that some other animal doesn't exist, so I'd just go kill myself to make the world a better place.
Now that I've been reading up on crypto I see what the real problem with DES was -- it is really slow in software, because it relies on bit (rather than byte) operations.
I think currently, specialized hardware is something like 1000 times as fast as software, which means if you want something to encrypt your T1 connection in software, you have to use single DES, which can be cracked by dedicated hardware.
I think this beautifully shows the problem inherent in the GPLs viral nature. You can't even use GPL 2 code in a GPL 3 license, or vice-versa, unless someone said "or a later version".
I gotta say that anyone who puts "or a later version" is being foolish. How can you know that you will approve of a license you haven't even read?
First, let me say I found this really interesting, because it explains after the fact why I didn't play any video games for so long -- I played Doom and Street Fighter, why play them again with different graphics? I play Everquest, which at least has a believable world and gameplay.
But my question is, are there any open source game projects going on? I'd love to work on something like that.
Bottom line: copyright exists and is a Good Thing. People should have blanket copyright protection over their creations.
,or turned back, for their private benefit. "
I fail to see any basis for this claim. Copyright is an arbitrary collection of rights. It is not property in the same sense that the radio sitting on my desk is property. Physical objects happen to have a very easy to understand and economically efficient bundle of rights we can call ownership (the right to use it isn't separate from the right to sell it). Other stuff is more complicated. We would have problems with such a simple notion of ownership for land -- instead we have all sorts of exceptions, like easements.
With copyright, once something has been produced, it's economically inefficient to allow copyright protection on it. Until it's been produced, it's economically inefficient to not allow copyright protection. Copyright is a gift granted by the government, and what the government gives, the government can take away. It's perfectly legitimate to say, "we'll provide the force to give you exclusive rights to your creative work, but in return, you have to be reasonable about how you license it. otherwise, we'll refuse to enforce this against people who are you are being unreasonable with."
There is no compulsion from this. You are not compelled to do anything. Without government, there would be no copyright (as opposed to real ownership like "this is my radio, and I'll shoot you if you disagree") just because it's impossible to enforce. It's also perfectly legitimate to say you can't use technical means to prevent copying and still get copyright protection (makes "for a limited time" difficult to do).
So, obligatory Heinlein quote:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped
Your knee-jerk, anti-innovation, unfounded fears are the reason millions of children each year go blind, even though it could be prevented by the widespread adoption of golden rice.
Caution is not free. Caution would say that we should never have built cars, because they harm the environment. Caution would say that we should not have built the internet, because we may become reliant on something that is unreliable. Caution will damn us to whatever technology is tried and true, destroy innovation, and plunge us back into the dark ages.
This message is not intended to be funny.
Man, it disgusts me that probably the easiest solution is to delete them. Someone's going to complain about it being unfair, so you have to bring it down to the least common denominator, rather than let those who can, get the bonus.
"those who would sacrifice a freedom for security will get, and deserve, neither" (not an exact quote of Franklin, I think).
It's your kid. Hate to break it to you, but it isn't our responsibility to raise your kid how you want him raised. Nor is it our job to subject ourselves to inconvenience to make it easier for you to raise your kid how you want. Don't want your kid playing violent video games? Don't get him a video game system and know who his friends are. "Oh, but that's so much work, couldn't the government do it for me?"
What the ratings system has meant is that if you want to make a movie that doesn't pass the board with an R, you aren't going to get to show it anywhere. How many of you saw Kids in the theater? I thought it was a great movie with a important message. You know what else? No kids are going to go see it. I mean, a friend of my who ran a church youth group took them to see it, but it's not exactly going to spread by word of mouth.
How about American History X? Rated R. Only movie that has ever given me a nightmare. Should children be allowed to see it? Sure, why not? They can go to a bookstore and get a copy of Hersey's Hiroshima, with graphic descriptions of people's flesh falling off from the effects of radiation sickness, or Eli Weisel's Night that talks about people starving to death or grateful even for someone turning a hose on the train car they were locked in because it was unbearably hot. But when someone tries to present an unpleasant issue in a format that may actually attract those who don't like to read books, they won't let the kids in.
It's not the movies, or the video games, that are violent and brutal. It's reality. If you want to shelter your son from that fact, that's fine. But do not ask me to help you gut culture because you don't like it. You keep your kids sheltered by keeping them sheltered. Like with a curfew, and keeping track of what they do.
You are the problem. The entirity of the problem in today's world is reflected in your whining. You want someone else to solve your problems for you. You don't want to have to do things for yourself. This is the problem, whether people are saying they don't want to deal with their personality problems and turn to drugs, that they don't want to deal with the fact that they're a klutz and turn to personal injury attorneys, that they don't want to deal with teh fact that they're a loser and sue for wrongful termination, or that they don't want to deal with the fact that they are not confident in their ability to raise a child and turn to government to do it for them.
Okay, I don't know that he said that, but the issue is that Bush and Cheney know what freedom is, and think it is a good thing, but it is not an unqualified good thing. That's far better than the democrats, who think that freedom is completely irrelevant, because they will discover the one true way to run your life, and then they will force it on you.
I dislike republicans because they're inconsist in applying their principles and tend toward hypocracy. I displike democrats because they're servants of the devil who want to enslave the world to acheive their goals.
Consider this statement:
.NET (presuming, of course, that it was available today).
.NET will run on any system that has .NET runtime installed. Could someone please explain to me the difference here?
In the world that the Java community envisions, that program can run on any computer. That's just not so in the Microsoft world. It will only run on Microsoft
Now, IIRC, Java will run on any system that has the Java runtime installed.
No, the problem is that the cost of getting electricity to California is above the cost you can sell it at. There's a cap on consumer rates (effectively, not in detail), and the supply market is artificially overpriced. Oh, and you can't build any new plants because it's bad for the environment. And only gas plants have been built for like the past 20 years, which are the most expensive around. Oh, yeah, did we mention that the same environmentalists who keep people from building plants want to mandate electric cars?
Fucking communists should move to China, and leave us alone.
If someone were to crack RSA, that is, find a method to find one key from the other in less than exponential time, it would automatically follow that they had a method to factor numbers in polynomial time. It's not just that if you can factor numbers, you can solve RSA. If you have the public and the private key, you can recover the factors of N, which almost everyone thinks is hard.
Factoring is not believed to be NP-Complete, but it isn't thought to be in P either. It's in the "can't do it in P, but it's easier than other stuff you can't do in P". Breaking RSA isn't the same as breaking something like DES. DES is a strange bundle of a bunch of stuff with little theoretical backing (it just works). RSA is based on really simple number theory. Breaking it would probably be the biggest math story of the decade (this one, that is. last decade had a better one).
But then the people to sue are those who violate the NDA, yes? If you never signed an NDA and someone gives you the information (who is violating the NDA and hence could be sued) then aren't you clear to scream it from the rooftops?
No, my impression is that if the source of the information can be traced back to a trade secret, the company can get an injunction against you from using it. From my understanding, if, for example, some project leader in Microsoft were to post the source code to something, and say, "here, this will make it easier to make your stuff interoperate", Microsoft could come by a year later and say, "oh, he was never given permission to do that, he violated his NDA, and all that stuff is trade secrets". I'm sure there's checks to make sure it isn't abused this blatantly, but I think you have hit on one of the biggest problems of trade secrets.
Reverse engineering does not mean black box methods. Black box methods are one technique of reverse engineering. They have the advantage of looking a little better when lawsuits come around, and the disadvantage of being much harder.
Compaq used clean room techniques because of what it was they were doing. When writing low level code, and it has to be bug compatible with something else, you're going to recreate the exact code that was in the original, because there's only so many ways to do something. Now copyright isn't like patents in what it protects. Patents protect the idea, even if you rediscover it. Copyright only protect a specific implementation. For a patent, it doesn't matter how you came up with the idea. On the other hand, for copyright, it only matters how you got the idea. If I get an idea for a poem, and come up with something that's nearly identical to some obscure Robert Frost piece, the courts would start with the presumption that since it's so similar, it must be a copy, but if I could prove that I had never read the poem, nor anything that referred to the poem, or had any knowledge that the poem existed, then my version would be mine. Probably this would make it even more of a pain for the next person to spontaneously come up with this poem.
With a patent, on the other hand, if I have a blinding flash in my algebra class and write down some patented algorithm, it's still infringing. It doesn't matter that I never heard of it.
Coming back to DeCSS, if the algorithm is obtained by disassembling the assembly, and then that algorithm is published in a natural language description, then the same author does an implementation in C, it's probably okay. The C isn't going to directly lift anything from the assembly except some of the tables. Given the principle that data cannot be copyrighted (you can't copyright the fact that your study shows that 53% of tech workers want to kill their boss), you could argue that the tables are also not a creative work.
The only issue of anonymous information is whether any of that may have come from people who have signed NDAs. Trade secrets are like patents (covering ideas) but with copyright style rules for when they apply (if you rediscover it, someone's trade secret doesn't apply).
Sony should run the game. They should run the game as specified in the EULA. If they fail to run the game as specified in the EULA, they are failing in their responsibilities to the customers who do not want to play on a server where people buy and sell characters and items.
Personally, I think that Sony might want to put a server that supports this, and maybe allow people to buy and sell through their auction site, but this isn't about stealing from the people who want to buy and sell. It's about keeping the game fun for those who don't.
I'm not paying $10/month to play a game filled with people trying to gain artifacts to sell to people in the real world, or with people who are willing to sink a fortune into starting off as a level 50 character. I'm paying $10/month to play a game according to the rules that were presented to me when I signed up.
Explaination by analogy. Today, Pres. Dubya reinstated an old policy (dating to 1984) that any health charity that provides abortions will not be eligible for US international aid.
If Bush did this in order to make all these groups ineligible for the money, that would be the equivalent of someone GPL'ing their code so that you aren't able to use it.
If Bush did this to make those organizations stop providing abortions, this would be the equivalent of someone GPL'ing their code so that you are forced to GPL your code. This is why someone above said that the GPL isn't a software license, it's a political tool.
Popmail is an email client so simple it does not need to be learned. Do a search for it.
I totally agree with you analogy. It is exactly like giving something to someone then calling it theft. Heads should roll. The first should be the teacher who laid down the challenge, the next should be whoever decided to suspend the student.