You're a moron. It's your prerogative to be flabbergastingly ignorant, but don't go correcting people who're right.
There is an entire day between being on one side of the line and the other. This is why we call it the Date Line. If you're on the GMT/UTC+12 side of the line, you are exactly one day ahead of the people on GMT/UTC-12 side of the line.
As of this post, the time was about 5:30 AM on Friday in Wellington and 8:30 AM on Thursday in Anchorage, Alaska.
In the current climate, running from police officers is a really bad idea, no matter what your skin colour.
I disagree with many of your conclusions though. Surely a terrorist determined to blow himself up would have made for a crowded area, rather than blowing himself up in an open space to no avail when challenged by the police? And that's what Mr. Menezes did, vaulting the Tube station barricade. Given the suspicious nature of his behaviour, the police must have been convinced he was a terrorist. They pinned him down, he struggled, they panicked, it being quite clear in their minds he was attempting to blow himself and them up. Men tend not to be at their most rational when they think someone's trying to kill them. So they shot him, and only then discovered their mistake.
Lacking these powers would render them incapable of acting against real terrorists. Having them means civilians who act suspiciously are at risk from the police as well. So far the terrorists have proven more of a danger than the police. If this changes, perhaps things will need to be rethought.
Gunpowder is not something you get out of rocks. Don't be ignorant.
It's a recipe comprising charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre, the last of which occurs naturally in a few places but must be manufactured in most. Historically it came usually from excrement or urine. The proportions in the mixture are quite unequal. It's not just a technology, it's one of the most important technologies the world has ever seen.
While there's a certain absurdity in the notion of patenting something that the Chinese had for millenia and is known to have existed in Europe since Roger Bacon wrote down a recipe in 1249, there were many more Industrial Revolution era inventions that could have been sensibly substituted for gunpowder and spaghetti. So both the specifics and the general thrust of your argument are quite wrong.
No, it would still be an increase of one thousand percent.
When something increases x%, it goes up by a factor of the percentage divided by one hundred. When something decreases x%, it is reduced by x parts per hundred. This is common terminology in all manner of fields, economic or statistical.
Speaking of percentage changes made in a population is in fact the non-obvious interpretation, and this is why people usually phrase such descriptions in the form "x went from y percent to z percent".
While I'd agree in principle with the "no more accidents than expected given the shipping traffic" it seems odd that your librarian claims the Marie Celeste (or Mary Celeste, as it was before Conan Doyle got his hands on it) never existed.
How "open" do you expect TrollTech to be? Qt is GPLed, after all - what's your gripe, that it's not BSD licenced? I honestly can't see any grounds for complaint about TrollTech's level of commitment to open source.
You retain the rights to the code you have written, including releasing it again with or without modifications as a closed-source program (cf Qt). If you have released this program under a licence that opens up the source, you cannot withdraw that program from being under that licence unless you have a proviso permitting just that somewhere in the licence agreement. Such provisions in a licence are likely to make would-be users view it suspiciously, so I have a hard job believing a licence along those lines would take off.
You're neglecting the little fact that the user went over the sysadmins' heads straight to upper management.
If someone gets upper management in an uproar over a perceived huge problem, and it turns out that the problem is non-existent and this could have easily been established by checking with the people in whose field the problem lies, upper management are likely to get itchy. Time spent by the most expensive people in the company is getting blown on the user's cries of "Wolf".
Somehow I don't think the user would have faced any sort of discipline had he gone to the IT department and said "Hey people, I ran a scan on our network and the results disturb me."
Could you take your baggage elsewhere, please?
Re:neither numbers nor math are universal, power i
on
How To Talk To Aliens
·
· Score: 1
Rings a bell, I suspect it could be one of Van Vogt's. I'll check my book of his short stories when I get home tonight; if I'm right, I'll post a followup.
Why is this newsworthy? Graphology is completely unsound from a scientific point of view, though it might interest students of the Forer effect. What next? Steve Ballmer's horoscope? What the tarot has to say about Larry Ellison's future? Crop circles resembling Linus' face? (All right, I reckon the last one could possibly be newsworthy. But, still, do we really want to go further in this direction?)
But if both of you are employing the same strategy, your odds of winning are only 50%. And if your opponent is using the strategy of picking the play that beats what he chose last round, your odds of victory with this strategy are 0%.
Given this, don't you think it's a bit rich to call it a "winning" strategy?
I'm not particularly interested in specific implementations of the death penalty; I don't live in a country that has a death penalty, and I've no particular desire to have one introduced. I'm willing to take your word for it that the specific implementation you have locally is bogged down in bureaucracy to such an extent that any advantages it might have in terms of cost and convenience are lost, but that does not mean that the death penalty is inherently more costly; that would be ludicrous. I think you'd find it very hard to argue that there is any sensible reason for such to be the case. Killing people is something that can be done cheaply and efficiently even without the whole apparatus of a state; providing someone with food and shelter for most of a lifetime costs real money. I suspect the costs introduced in this case are mainly legal ones, i.e. self-inflicted ones.
Cost and convenience are factors that people are willing to value over potential loss of human life, and these are factors which potentially come into play here, as my walking/taking the car analogy was designed to bring to your attention. You're trying to present the death penalty as something entirely equivalent to prison, except that it kills people. It's not. It's a completely different approach to punishment. It's not the same as having two types of plane or car, one of which kills people and one of which doesn't. I reiterate, the logic of your position is flawed. While I would be prepared to agree that there are good reasons not to have a death penalty, I can't possibly support an argument that's built on syllogisms.
>What if you had a choice between an aircraft which >killed innocent people and one didn't kill innocent >people? Would you choose the non-killing version? I >bet so.
Not that I'm a death penalty proponent, but that logic's flawed. We have the choice between using cars (which kill vast numbers of people annually) and walking. Cars are widely used. Now, yes, walking is horrendously inconvenient compared to car travel, but locking someone up in jail at the taxpayer's expense is also horrendously inconvenient/expensive for all involved in the resulting necessary jail system.
What percentage of the Internet Explorer audience run it because Firefox isn't geeky enough, and will be tempted by a "geekier, more configurable" browser?
I don't buy the threat to IE market share. I'm sure it's a great browser, and I'm geeky enough to take an interest in it, but if I were representative of 99% of the population, Linux would be massive on the desktop.
Lens curvature? Nowhere near precise enough even in the ideal image where the surface was facing dead on to you; remember we're working to the fairly crude constraints of pixel data (think integers all the way), and if determining distance from curvature worked at all it would work only with lines large enough to have visible curvature. In addition to all this, accurate line detection from photos can be a bit hit and miss anyway, which is going to make the error in your calculations impossible to work with without the manual interaction I already mentioned. This isn't within a thousand miles of being a practical method.
My field's computer geometry, and I'm working on commercialising a fairly advanced bit of research which does this kind of thing (albeit with a fair bit of manual interaction and multiple photos). We're nowhere near finding a way to automate plane extraction from a single photo.
Bullshit. There's nothing "easy" about extracting 3D plane data from a photograph. In fact, I can't claim to know of any techniques that allow you to do that without either manual interaction or multiple photographs (using stuff like stereo matching etc) and I work in the field. Even if you had a laser scan from a single perspective, it could be rather challenging to search a large database of laser scans and find the ones that match the original scanned object, and that's when you have depth data to play with.
>Im just conserned because im a web developer, and >really would perfer not to need to worry about >another browser that might not follow standards.
There's no "might" about it; of course it won't follow standards, if the IE rendering engine is enabled. But it won't follow standards in the IE way, which any web developer should be perfectly familiar with. If you check Gecko and IE rendering anyway, I fail to see how this will make any difference to you as a web developer.
There seem to be a remarkably large number of people posting on this one who haven't read past the title, never mind the article.
This isn't about a consumer price for a kernel binary. Comparisons with copies of Windows are irrelevant. The $612 million dollars quoted is a suggested figure representing the kind of cost a commercial company would have to take on to develop an identical operating system kernel.
Software companies have in the past changed hands for large sums of money. The brand is of course worth some of that money, as are relationships with existing customers, but a large part of that value is the IP possessed by the company. There are few companies that have possessed software assets of a complexity and widespread use comparable to the Linux kernel that have changed hands, and such companies when sold have been bought for large sums - to pick one example, Netscape was bought by AOL at a price tag of $4.2 billion dollars.
The value of the Linux kernel code and Linux branding, if a company with sufficient resources were interested in obtaining it, and if it were for sale, would quite probably exceed this figure of $612 million by a sizeable percentage.
$50K is a derisory offer for even an non-exclusive right to develop and redistribute the IP, which is effectively what a solitary copy under the BSD licence would give. Certainly the company I work for would laugh helplessly if such an offer was made for our code, which is several orders of magnitude smaller and less complex than the kernel.
Not necessarily true, unless something has recently changed. The UK comprises more than one educational system, and certainly when doing my Scottish Highers eight years ago a graphic calculator was viewed as entirely acceptable, provided that its memory was wiped at the door. Indeed, the first thing I did in my Maths Higher was to program a quadratic equation solver into the now pristine memory of my calculator.
Of course, calculators have doubtless come a long way in the last eight years, and I could see a ban being eminently practical.
Sheesh, let's mark this redundant already. It was sort of funny the first time, but the satirist's no Swift, it doesn't improve on rereading, and it appears over and over again. Please, no more!
There spoke someone with insufficient experience coding in both. For starters, Qt allows you to "skin" your apps to look like they came off any of a number of OSes.
I spent most of a year maintaining a compiler written in Java. I came to miss pointers badly in certain places - when you come to the limits of the String class, not having a way to bypass it and tinker directly with the data makes life harder. It wasn't particularly snappy. I didn't come away from the experience wanting to use Java over everything else. Java has some good points, but it also has its own frustrations.
I've spent the last couple of years working with Qt on a 3D graphics app. Qt interfaces really rather nicely with OpenGL - you'd be stupid to even try implementing cutting-edge graphics in Java. Qt is pretty sharp performance-wise, and certainly in a different speed league to Java. It's at least as well-documented. It gives you all of the advantages C++ still holds over Java, plus great cross-platform portability, and I frankly feel it pushes Java toward irrelevancy.
Seriously, where? It's the old chestnut about freedom of speech not including the right to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre. Do we accept websites advocating genocide should be guaranteed "freedom of expression", or hate crimes? Most people will draw a line somewhere, and again for most of them, advocates of cannibalism and necrophilia will be pretty near to that line if not over it. I don't think anyone's arguing that rational debates encompassing these topics need to be banned; you're talking about a small number of websites that cater to obsessives.
I think there's some room for moderation. Many good things stop being good things when in excess. Moreover, as one desirous to see those freedoms of expression we have kept, I think it's important to limit ourselves to defending positions the general public can understand. Standing up for necrophiliacs, cannibals and paedophiles will result in people not listening when we talk about something that has more general effect and is pertinent to their wellbeing.
And yet those who contact Microsoft with patches for the leaked code are marking themselves as individuals who've read that code. As such, they are now fair game for Microsoft should they ever work on a piece of open source or commercial software that duplicates in some way functionality present in Windows.
I'm staying away from the code, and if I were ever tempted to look at it and did discover a vulnerability, I certainly wouldn't release a patch with my name attached.
This is harsh, unfair, and based on a quite unwarranted British stereotype (although I can provide personal anecdotal evidence). That said, here goes...
If irony detection isn't a standard feature even in most Americans, how the heck are they going to build machines capable of it?
Slashdot Mirror
You're a moron. It's your prerogative to be flabbergastingly ignorant, but don't go correcting people who're right.
There is an entire day between being on one side of the line and the other. This is why we call it the Date Line. If you're on the GMT/UTC+12 side of the line, you are exactly one day ahead of the people on GMT/UTC-12 side of the line.
As of this post, the time was about 5:30 AM on Friday in Wellington and 8:30 AM on Thursday in Anchorage, Alaska.
The Brazilian fellow was white-skinned. Check out the various images of him floating round various news websites.
g /_41337183_menezes203.jpgg /_41336581_victim203.jpg
Here's a couple from the BBC:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41337000/jp
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41336000/jp
In the current climate, running from police officers is a really bad idea, no matter what your skin colour.
I disagree with many of your conclusions though. Surely a terrorist determined to blow himself up would have made for a crowded area, rather than blowing himself up in an open space to no avail when challenged by the police? And that's what Mr. Menezes did, vaulting the Tube station barricade. Given the suspicious nature of his behaviour, the police must have been convinced he was a terrorist. They pinned him down, he struggled, they panicked, it being quite clear in their minds he was attempting to blow himself and them up. Men tend not to be at their most rational when they think someone's trying to kill them. So they shot him, and only then discovered their mistake.
Lacking these powers would render them incapable of acting against real terrorists. Having them means civilians who act suspiciously are at risk from the police as well. So far the terrorists have proven more of a danger than the police. If this changes, perhaps things will need to be rethought.
Gunpowder is not something you get out of rocks. Don't be ignorant.
It's a recipe comprising charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre, the last of which occurs naturally in a few places but must be manufactured in most. Historically it came usually from excrement or urine. The proportions in the mixture are quite unequal. It's not just a technology, it's one of the most important technologies the world has ever seen.
While there's a certain absurdity in the notion of patenting something that the Chinese had for millenia and is known to have existed in Europe since Roger Bacon wrote down a recipe in 1249, there were many more Industrial Revolution era inventions that could have been sensibly substituted for gunpowder and spaghetti. So both the specifics and the general thrust of your argument are quite wrong.
No, it would still be an increase of one thousand percent.
When something increases x%, it goes up by a factor of the percentage divided by one hundred. When something decreases x%, it is reduced by x parts per hundred. This is common terminology in all manner of fields, economic or statistical.
Speaking of percentage changes made in a population is in fact the non-obvious interpretation, and this is why people usually phrase such descriptions in the form "x went from y percent to z percent".
While I'd agree in principle with the "no more accidents than expected given the shipping traffic" it seems odd that your librarian claims the Marie Celeste (or Mary Celeste, as it was before Conan Doyle got his hands on it) never existed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste
Wikipedia seems to give an identifiable history with a lot of detail for both the ship and captain.
How "open" do you expect TrollTech to be? Qt is GPLed, after all - what's your gripe, that it's not BSD licenced? I honestly can't see any grounds for complaint about TrollTech's level of commitment to open source.
You retain the rights to the code you have written, including releasing it again with or without modifications as a closed-source program (cf Qt). If you have released this program under a licence that opens up the source, you cannot withdraw that program from being under that licence unless you have a proviso permitting just that somewhere in the licence agreement. Such provisions in a licence are likely to make would-be users view it suspiciously, so I have a hard job believing a licence along those lines would take off.
You're neglecting the little fact that the user went over the sysadmins' heads straight to upper management.
If someone gets upper management in an uproar over a perceived huge problem, and it turns out that the problem is non-existent and this could have easily been established by checking with the people in whose field the problem lies, upper management are likely to get itchy. Time spent by the most expensive people in the company is getting blown on the user's cries of "Wolf".
Somehow I don't think the user would have faced any sort of discipline had he gone to the IT department and said "Hey people, I ran a scan on our network and the results disturb me."
Could you take your baggage elsewhere, please?
Rings a bell, I suspect it could be one of Van Vogt's. I'll check my book of his short stories when I get home tonight; if I'm right, I'll post a followup.
Why is this newsworthy? Graphology is completely unsound from a scientific point of view, though it might interest students of the Forer effect. What next? Steve Ballmer's horoscope? What the tarot has to say about Larry Ellison's future? Crop circles resembling Linus' face? (All right, I reckon the last one could possibly be newsworthy. But, still, do we really want to go further in this direction?)
But if both of you are employing the same strategy, your odds of winning are only 50%. And if your opponent is using the strategy of picking the play that beats what he chose last round, your odds of victory with this strategy are 0%.
Given this, don't you think it's a bit rich to call it a "winning" strategy?
I'm not particularly interested in specific implementations of the death penalty; I don't live in a country that has a death penalty, and I've no particular desire to have one introduced. I'm willing to take your word for it that the specific implementation you have locally is bogged down in bureaucracy to such an extent that any advantages it might have in terms of cost and convenience are lost, but that does not mean that the death penalty is inherently more costly; that would be ludicrous. I think you'd find it very hard to argue that there is any sensible reason for such to be the case. Killing people is something that can be done cheaply and efficiently even without the whole apparatus of a state; providing someone with food and shelter for most of a lifetime costs real money. I suspect the costs introduced in this case are mainly legal ones, i.e. self-inflicted ones.
Cost and convenience are factors that people are willing to value over potential loss of human life, and these are factors which potentially come into play here, as my walking/taking the car analogy was designed to bring to your attention. You're trying to present the death penalty as something entirely equivalent to prison, except that it kills people. It's not. It's a completely different approach to punishment. It's not the same as having two types of plane or car, one of which kills people and one of which doesn't. I reiterate, the logic of your position is flawed. While I would be prepared to agree that there are good reasons not to have a death penalty, I can't possibly support an argument that's built on syllogisms.
>What if you had a choice between an aircraft which
>killed innocent people and one didn't kill innocent
>people? Would you choose the non-killing version? I
>bet so.
Not that I'm a death penalty proponent, but that logic's flawed. We have the choice between using cars (which kill vast numbers of people annually) and walking. Cars are widely used. Now, yes, walking is horrendously inconvenient compared to car travel, but locking someone up in jail at the taxpayer's expense is also horrendously inconvenient/expensive for all involved in the resulting necessary jail system.
What percentage of the Internet Explorer audience run it because Firefox isn't geeky enough, and will be tempted by a "geekier, more configurable" browser?
I don't buy the threat to IE market share. I'm sure it's a great browser, and I'm geeky enough to take an interest in it, but if I were representative of 99% of the population, Linux would be massive on the desktop.
Lens curvature? Nowhere near precise enough even in the ideal image where the surface was facing dead on to you; remember we're working to the fairly crude constraints of pixel data (think integers all the way), and if determining distance from curvature worked at all it would work only with lines large enough to have visible curvature. In addition to all this, accurate line detection from photos can be a bit hit and miss anyway, which is going to make the error in your calculations impossible to work with without the manual interaction I already mentioned. This isn't within a thousand miles of being a practical method.
My field's computer geometry, and I'm working on commercialising a fairly advanced bit of research which does this kind of thing (albeit with a fair bit of manual interaction and multiple photos). We're nowhere near finding a way to automate plane extraction from a single photo.
Bullshit. There's nothing "easy" about extracting 3D plane data from a photograph. In fact, I can't claim to know of any techniques that allow you to do that without either manual interaction or multiple photographs (using stuff like stereo matching etc) and I work in the field. Even if you had a laser scan from a single perspective, it could be rather challenging to search a large database of laser scans and find the ones that match the original scanned object, and that's when you have depth data to play with.
>Im just conserned because im a web developer, and
>really would perfer not to need to worry about
>another browser that might not follow standards.
There's no "might" about it; of course it won't follow standards, if the IE rendering engine is enabled. But it won't follow standards in the IE way, which any web developer should be perfectly familiar with. If you check Gecko and IE rendering anyway, I fail to see how this will make any difference to you as a web developer.
Those would be American patents, right? As in patents that have no legal significance outside America? And we're talking about China and India, right?
Yeah. That's what I thought.
There seem to be a remarkably large number of people posting on this one who haven't read past the title, never mind the article.
This isn't about a consumer price for a kernel binary. Comparisons with copies of Windows are irrelevant. The $612 million dollars quoted is a suggested figure representing the kind of cost a commercial company would have to take on to develop an identical operating system kernel.
Software companies have in the past changed hands for large sums of money. The brand is of course worth some of that money, as are relationships with existing customers, but a large part of that value is the IP possessed by the company. There are few companies that have possessed software assets of a complexity and widespread use comparable to the Linux kernel that have changed hands, and such companies when sold have been bought for large sums - to pick one example, Netscape was bought by AOL at a price tag of $4.2 billion dollars.
The value of the Linux kernel code and Linux branding, if a company with sufficient resources were interested in obtaining it, and if it were for sale, would quite probably exceed this figure of $612 million by a sizeable percentage.
$50K is a derisory offer for even an non-exclusive right to develop and redistribute the IP, which is effectively what a solitary copy under the BSD licence would give. Certainly the company I work for would laugh helplessly if such an offer was made for our code, which is several orders of magnitude smaller and less complex than the kernel.
Savant
Not necessarily true, unless something has recently changed. The UK comprises more than one educational system, and certainly when doing my Scottish Highers eight years ago a graphic calculator was viewed as entirely acceptable, provided that its memory was wiped at the door. Indeed, the first thing I did in my Maths Higher was to program a quadratic equation solver into the now pristine memory of my calculator.
Of course, calculators have doubtless come a long way in the last eight years, and I could see a ban being eminently practical.
Sheesh, let's mark this redundant already. It was sort of funny the first time, but the satirist's no Swift, it doesn't improve on rereading, and it appears over and over again. Please, no more!
Savant
There spoke someone with insufficient experience coding in both. For starters, Qt allows you to "skin" your apps to look like they came off any of a number of OSes.
I spent most of a year maintaining a compiler written in Java. I came to miss pointers badly in certain places - when you come to the limits of the String class, not having a way to bypass it and tinker directly with the data makes life harder. It wasn't particularly snappy. I didn't come away from the experience wanting to use Java over everything else. Java has some good points, but it also has its own frustrations.
I've spent the last couple of years working with Qt on a 3D graphics app. Qt interfaces really rather nicely with OpenGL - you'd be stupid to even try implementing cutting-edge graphics in Java. Qt is pretty sharp performance-wise, and certainly in a different speed league to Java. It's at least as well-documented. It gives you all of the advantages C++ still holds over Java, plus great cross-platform portability, and I frankly feel it pushes Java toward irrelevancy.
Savant
Seriously, where? It's the old chestnut about freedom of speech not including the right to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre. Do we accept websites advocating genocide should be guaranteed "freedom of expression", or hate crimes? Most people will draw a line somewhere, and again for most of them, advocates of cannibalism and necrophilia will be pretty near to that line if not over it. I don't think anyone's arguing that rational debates encompassing these topics need to be banned; you're talking about a small number of websites that cater to obsessives.
I think there's some room for moderation. Many good things stop being good things when in excess. Moreover, as one desirous to see those freedoms of expression we have kept, I think it's important to limit ourselves to defending positions the general public can understand. Standing up for necrophiliacs, cannibals and paedophiles will result in people not listening when we talk about something that has more general effect and is pertinent to their wellbeing.
Savant
And yet those who contact Microsoft with patches for the leaked code are marking themselves as individuals who've read that code. As such, they are now fair game for Microsoft should they ever work on a piece of open source or commercial software that duplicates in some way functionality present in Windows.
I'm staying away from the code, and if I were ever tempted to look at it and did discover a vulnerability, I certainly wouldn't release a patch with my name attached.
This is harsh, unfair, and based on a quite unwarranted British stereotype (although I can provide personal anecdotal evidence). That said, here goes...
If irony detection isn't a standard feature even in most Americans, how the heck are they going to build machines capable of it?