'' As has already been pointed out to another commenter: the ability to play DRMed iTunes files and the ability to play non-DRMed MP3 files are separate concepts. The article might have worded this better, granted. ''
Just wanted to mention non-DRMed AAC files, which probably keep many people away from any player that doesn't play AAC.
Somehow, nobody making portable music players dared putting AAC capability in their player, probably to avoid upsetting Microsoft (I'd love to be corrected if I am wrong). And guess what Microsoft does: Makes a portable music player that plays AAC.
'' 2. Any show, any time - with commercials. I wouldn't mind commercials on shows if I could pick whatever show I wanted, whenever I wanted - even if I couldn't skip them (or, if they forced a few at the beginning/middle or something like that). Then, if I want to watch "Veronica Mars", I just go right to the episode. No worried about my schedule - I just watch it. ''
Actually, that's an excellent idea. For everyone who doesn't know it yet: You pay for TV by watching the advertisements. That's why TV companies and advertisers don't like Tivo: Because it lets you watch TV without advertisements which means to them: Without paying. There is no reason for them not to make TV shows available for free, as long as you cannot remove the advertisements, and as long as they don't have any costs. Apple could distribute things for free as well, counting the bandwidth cost as cost to promote sales of iTVs. And they could allow you to make and distribute copies, as long as the advertisements are not skipped.
'' Use one or more of the following: 1.) "We have launched our own internal investigation..." 2.) "We are cooperating with authorities..." 3.) Imply that the offending personnel have long since left the company... 4.) Imply that CEO was unaware of wrong-doing... 5.) Use the phrase "a few bad apples..." Apple can't use #5 (for obvious reasons), but they have used the other four. Sounds about as believable as Tony Snow discussing Iraq... ''
1) It was actually Apple who first found problems, told the SEC they had found problems, and started its own internal investigation. 2) If a company says "we are NOT cooperating with authorities", the company has a real problem. 3) Considering that this is about events from 1997 to 2002, it is not unusual that people leave a company in four years. 4) Steve Jobs just made a cool 3500 million dollars by selling his share of Pixar; the whole case here is about options worth less than 17 million.
'' Backdating options is a legitimate accounting practice? It's never been allowed at any of the places I worked, where more than once I had options issued shortly after a huge aberrant stock spike and thus my option price was set so high that it never became profitable. I would have *loved* to have had them backdated, but had understood it was illegal to do so. ''
A company can give you any number of stock options it wishes, at any strike price it wishes. If the strike price is equal to the share price on the day the options are granted, the company does not have to pay any taxes on the grant. If the strike price is lower, then this is treated as if the company had given you cash, so you have to pay income tax, and the company has to register the difference as a loss. So it was always legal for the company to give you options at the share price at an earlier date, but YOU would have to pay income tax for it.
What is NOT legal is to modify the grant date and so hide the fact that taxes need to be paid.
Apple shares ended up exactly one cent higher today than yesterday, after huge panic selling in the morning.
Guys, do you realise that all of this story is just based on hearsay from some Anonymous Cowards?
(May I add that slashdot is sometimes completely braindead. On my first post it ignored my username/password marking this as a post by "anonymous coward", when it reposted it it asked me to "be more original". )
'' Soliciting to a crime or attempt to commit a crime is 'sometimes' punishable, sometimes it isn't (criminal law). Publicly sharing a folder feels to me like an attempt to commit a crime, but could be diminished by the user's stupidity (not knowing how to set permissions and such) ''
Well, there are different kinds of crime. If you plan to steal my wallet, and a police officer knows about it, he can wait until you take my wallet and arrest you afterwards. If you plan to kill me, and a police officer knows about it, he cannot wait until you kill me; he has to stop you before you do it or even try to do it. Therefore there is a good reason to make it a crime to plan or attempt to kill someone; there is much less reason to make it a crime planning to steal my wallet.
Also: Not knowing that sharing copyrighted files is a a copyright infringement is not an excuse. Not knowing that files you shared were copyrighted is some amount of excuse (if I give you some music, claiming that it is in the public domain, you share it, and it turns out that I lied to you, that is an excuse for you). Not knowing that you are sharing files _is_ an excuse (unless you should have known).
'' Copyrighted files on a shared folder is indeed not equal to sharing copyrighted files. However doesn't this show "intent to share" ? Don't know a lot on the US justice system (criminal, civil etc.) but I guess the proverb "stupidity doesn't mean innocense" still holds. To me it seems the plaintiff needs to prove actual sharing in order to get damages (?) ''
This seems a bit mixed up. First, having a shared folder does _not_ mean "intent to share". Even if it means "intent to share", it doesn't mean that any sharing and any copyright violation happened. If I offer everyone on Slashdot to copy my complete music collection, and nobody takes up the offer, then no copyright violation has happened. On the other hand, many on Slashdot have in the past argued that having an unprotected open wireless connection shows "intent to share", but they are wrong, and courts have decided they are wrong.
And that seems to be exactly the point that the judge made: There was a report saying that the defendant had file sharing turned on. The defendant complained because she was afraid someone might conclude that file sharing had actually happened. The judge rejected her complaint because _nobody could legally draw that conclusion_. Exactly as you said, the plaintiffs need to show that actual copyright violation happened, or has most likely happened.
Seriously. If anyone other than Microsoft had produced this abomination, then it would already have disappeared from the market completely. The only thing that keeps it alive is this weird expectation that because it is a Microsoft product, it automatically has to destroy all the competition. And here on Slashdot, someone even tried to raise sympathies for this product by calling it "the underdog". Underdog? Microsoft and underdog? For f***s sake, what is wrong with some people's brains?
Take this player on its own merits, and you will see that except for one innovation (brown color) there is absolutely nothing exciting about it.
Q. What do I have to do to copy music to another player wirelessly? A. Buy two Zunes, because you can be sure nobody else has one.
Then I'd ask you to fix the bugs in it, and to explain what it does.
If you can explain it, you have a good chance of getting hired for certain jobs. If you can't explain it, then we can both have a good laugh about your joke, and I can look at the next candidate.
'' 7 or so years ago I heard a great quote about this problem. "Technically, the nerds arguing that the new millennium doesn't start for another year are correct, but the rest of the world will party anyway." ''
One of the stupid new Labour bitches said the celebration was for Jesus Christ's 2000th birthday.
That was wrong on so many levels, it was unbelievable.
'' Was with my wife at the store getting a tree. Saw batteries; If I recall, 10 for 6.99 and 16 for 8.99.
She didn't know which was cheaper. ''
I think the easiest way to explain it that only requires multiplication and works with arbitrary amounts is this:
You could buy 16 packs of ten batteries, or you could buy 10 packs of 16 batteries. (You don't need to calculate how many batteries that is; the important thing is that it is the same number). So you need to compare 16 time 6.99 and 10 times 8.99.
I once saw a report in a TV show about an experiment they made in a shop: They put up a big sign "3 tins for 0.99" and a small sign "1 tin for 0.30". The shop sold more packs of three tins for 0.99:-(
Gunther Beckstein is _not_ the German minister of interior. He is the Bavarian minister of interior, which is not quite the same. Just as Arnold Schwarzenegger is not President of the USA.
And, as the article says, this is not suggestion a law, it is meant as a "basis for discussion".
'' So, according to that, the following would hold: if 1/0 = infinity then infinity * 0 = 1 which does not work, for obvious reasons. This I told my teacher in 6th grade. ''
If you read his article, you will find that he very carefully removes everything from the rules of arithmetic that would cause this kind of problems, which makes it at the same time correct and absolutely useless. His article isn't wrong, it is just useless.
We define three new quantities: An enormous pile of crap, a negative pile of crap, and a pile of crap of unknown size.
0/0 is a pile of crap of unknown size. a/0 is an enormous pile of crap if a > 0, and a negative pile of crap if a 0. Any operation involving a pile of crap of unknown size produces a pile of crap of unknown size. Adding anything to an enormous pile of crap gives an enormous pile of crap; adding anything to a negative pile of crap gives a negative pile of crap, the only exception is that adding an enormous pile of crap and a negative pile of crap gives a pile of crap of unknown size. Piles of crap of unknown size cannot be compared to anything. Multiplying any pile of crap by zero gives a pile of crap of unknown size.
Do I need to continue?
Basically, he has done something in a way quite similar to the IEEE 754 Standard, by defining Infinities and NaNs. However, he didn't define positive and negative zeroes, which makes the whole thing much less useful. And the rules for arithmetic are full of exception after exception, except that he claims the exceptions are part of the rules and therefore not exceptions.
Yes. Even better, in Java it is portable and guaranteed to work. Java has explicit functions to get the bit-representations of a float or double in a 32 bit or 64 bit integer and to create a float or double value from its bit-representation.
'' Definitely not clearer to someone well-versed in C, but also is not considered portable (I think -- it's been a few years since I was up on the C Standard). I believe C doesn't guarantee that all the union elements will be on the same alignment. The compiler will (probably) choose to do it that way, but it doesn't have to. ''
How would you suggest that elements of a union could possible have different alignment, since they have the same address?
The reason why it is non-portable is that the C Standard explicitely says that assigning to one element of a union and then reading another element is undefined behavior (with the exception of certain cases with elements that are structs). The "* (int *) &x" is non-portable for exactly the same reason (because the C Standard says so).
'' When this software code it turned into a hardware circuit and patented then the magic number on this line,"i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1);" will be the focus of the patent on the hardware circuit. It becomes very important to know who managed to skillfully approximate that mathematical technique with the code. ''
That is of course pure nonsense, because a hardware implementation will just take the lowest bit of the exponent and a few bits of the mantissa as an index into a lookup-table to get two coefficients for a stepwise linear function.
In an IEEE 32-bit floating point number, the highest bit is the sign bit. The next eight bits are the exponent adjusted by 0x7f, and the remaining 23 bits are the lower 23 bits of the mantissa. If you have a number x = 2^k * (1 + m / 2^23), then the floating point representation is highest bit = 0, next 8 bit = k + 0x7f, remaining 23 bits = m. That means you get
i = ((k + 0x7f) * 2^23) + m = (k > 1) and interprets it as a floating-point number. First we examine what happens if we multiply x by 4: The exponent of x, that is k, is increased by two. i is increased by (2 > 1) = 0x1fc00000 + m/2, and l = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1) = 0x3f7759df - m/2 = 0x3f000000 + 0x007759df - m/2. m/2 is between 0 and 0x003fffff, so the exponent field is equal to 0x3f000000. Interpreted as a floating-point number, it is (1/2) + (1 + (0x007759df - m/2) / 2^23) = (1/2) * (1.932430 - m/2^24) = (1/2) * (1.932430 - (x - 1)*2^23/2^24) = 1.216215 - x/4 after some length calculation. Now if you draw graphs of 1/sqrt (x) and 1.216215 - x/4 for 1 0x003759df.
However, with all that said, on a modern CPU this code might not be running too fast, because you need to write a floating-point register to memory, read back to an integer register, write back to memory, and read back to a floating-point register; that is not usually that a modern CPU likes to do. Both PowerPC and Intel/AMD CPUs have a vector instruction that will calculate an approximate inverse square root for four floating-point values simultaneously, with higher precision than this code does.
'' Why does the coder use int i = *(int*) instead of just int i = (int)x; ''
Get your copy of the C Standard out, or any book about C, and figure out for yourself what each of these statements does.
Maybe you can try a few different values for x, like 0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 and print * (int *) &x, preferably in hexadecimal format; that should give you some hint.
'' The problem that I can see is that if you eliminated patents altogether, it might lead companies to be very, very aggressive about preventing the disclosure of trade secrets. Working for an electronics firm would be like joining the Manhattan Project, and every device you bought would have all of its circuit boards potted in epoxy, mixed with iron filings to mess up X-rays and PET scanners. They'd probably also self-destruct if you opened the case. Industrial espionage would be de rigeur. ''
Most things that could be protected by reasonable software patents are actually protected by copyright law. The only difference is, if I have a simple idea and spend six months implementing it, with patent laws you are not allowed to implement the same simple idea, with copyright law you have the right to spend six months as well implementing it, without copyright law you would have the right to steal it.
In Germany, an additional protection is the law "against unfair competition". This used to protect software developers before it was clear that software has copyright (if I spend six months developing software before I sell it, and you just copy it and sell, then this is unfair competition). This would automatically protect inventions that took effort to develop (possibly just the effort of hiring someone really clever for $100,000 a year than someone much less clever for $40,000) from being ripped off.
'' Strikes me as true, and as always when claiming something is obvious, it begs the question "how come you didn't think of it then?" ''
Who says nobody has ever thought of it? I have a question: Have you ever thought of painting your shoes yellow? Probably not. On the other hand, if you went to a fancy dress party and needed yellow shoes to match your costume, then you would do exactly that. Are you saying that painting your shoes yellow could be patented because nobody thought of it before? That's nonsense. It is obvious, whether anyone thought of it, whether anyone wrote it down, or not.
'' UN sells in.1uCi amount, and according to our beloved Wikipedia, the lethal dose for INGESTED is.03uCi (assuming that 3 people in Chicago mistake Osama's gift cards for deep dish pizza and he has a very very fine razor blade to cut the sample into three parts). ''
No, 0.03 microcurie is _not_ the lethal dosis. 0.03 microcuries is the maximum that you are _allowed_ to swallow without the company you work at getting into trouble if it is found inside you.
Let's say you work at a company manufacturing rat poison. Obviously, some amount of rat poisin could enter your body. Tiny amounts _will_ enter your body. Health and safety authorities will have set a limit of how much rat poison is allowed to be in the body of the workers, without negative consequences to the company. That amount will be far, far, far away from a lethal dosis. It will be the maximum amount that doesn't affect you, not the smallest amount that kills you.
As the article says, these guys are selling quantities of 0.1 microcurie. The maximum allowable dose for ingested Polonium-210 is 0.03 microcurie according to Wikipedia. (Quote: The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1,100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10-12 gram. )
Note that "Maximum allowable body burden" is far from lethal. That is the amount where your employer has some explaining to do if you work at some place using polonium and that amount is found inside you; on the other hand, 0.02 microcurie would be considered fine. So eating one of those 0.1 microcurie things will be unhealthy, but I don't think it would do you permanent harm.
I was told that there are about 300 million guns around in the USA, and each one is capable of doing a lot more damage than 0.1 microcurie of polonium.
Slashdot Mirror
'' As has already been pointed out to another commenter: the ability to play DRMed iTunes files and the ability to play non-DRMed MP3 files are separate concepts. The article might have worded this better, granted. ''
Just wanted to mention non-DRMed AAC files, which probably keep many people away from any player that doesn't play AAC.
Somehow, nobody making portable music players dared putting AAC capability in their player, probably to avoid upsetting Microsoft (I'd love to be corrected if I am wrong). And guess what Microsoft does: Makes a portable music player that plays AAC.
'' 2. Any show, any time - with commercials. I wouldn't mind commercials on shows if I could pick whatever show I wanted, whenever I wanted - even if I couldn't skip them (or, if they forced a few at the beginning/middle or something like that). Then, if I want to watch "Veronica Mars", I just go right to the episode. No worried about my schedule - I just watch it. ''
Actually, that's an excellent idea. For everyone who doesn't know it yet: You pay for TV by watching the advertisements. That's why TV companies and advertisers don't like Tivo: Because it lets you watch TV without advertisements which means to them: Without paying. There is no reason for them not to make TV shows available for free, as long as you cannot remove the advertisements, and as long as they don't have any costs. Apple could distribute things for free as well, counting the bandwidth cost as cost to promote sales of iTVs. And they could allow you to make and distribute copies, as long as the advertisements are not skipped.
'' Use one or more of the following: 1.) "We have launched our own internal investigation..." 2.) "We are cooperating with authorities..." 3.) Imply that the offending personnel have long since left the company... 4.) Imply that CEO was unaware of wrong-doing... 5.) Use the phrase "a few bad apples..." Apple can't use #5 (for obvious reasons), but they have used the other four. Sounds about as believable as Tony Snow discussing Iraq... ''
1) It was actually Apple who first found problems, told the SEC they had found problems, and started its own internal investigation.
2) If a company says "we are NOT cooperating with authorities", the company has a real problem.
3) Considering that this is about events from 1997 to 2002, it is not unusual that people leave a company in four years.
4) Steve Jobs just made a cool 3500 million dollars by selling his share of Pixar; the whole case here is about options worth less than 17 million.
'' Backdating options is a legitimate accounting practice? It's never been allowed at any of the places I worked, where more than once I had options issued shortly after a huge aberrant stock spike and thus my option price was set so high that it never became profitable. I would have *loved* to have had them backdated, but had understood it was illegal to do so. ''
A company can give you any number of stock options it wishes, at any strike price it wishes. If the strike price is equal to the share price on the day the options are granted, the company does not have to pay any taxes on the grant. If the strike price is lower, then this is treated as if the company had given you cash, so you have to pay income tax, and the company has to register the difference as a loss. So it was always legal for the company to give you options at the share price at an earlier date, but YOU would have to pay income tax for it.
What is NOT legal is to modify the grant date and so hide the fact that taxes need to be paid.
Apple shares ended up exactly one cent higher today than yesterday, after huge panic selling in the morning.
Guys, do you realise that all of this story is just based on hearsay from some Anonymous Cowards?
(May I add that slashdot is sometimes completely braindead. On my first post it ignored my username/password marking this as a post by "anonymous coward", when it reposted it it asked me to "be more original". )
'' Soliciting to a crime or attempt to commit a crime is 'sometimes' punishable, sometimes it isn't (criminal law). Publicly sharing a folder feels to me like an attempt to commit a crime, but could be diminished by the user's stupidity (not knowing how to set permissions and such) ''
Well, there are different kinds of crime. If you plan to steal my wallet, and a police officer knows about it, he can wait until you take my wallet and arrest you afterwards. If you plan to kill me, and a police officer knows about it, he cannot wait until you kill me; he has to stop you before you do it or even try to do it. Therefore there is a good reason to make it a crime to plan or attempt to kill someone; there is much less reason to make it a crime planning to steal my wallet.
Also: Not knowing that sharing copyrighted files is a a copyright infringement is not an excuse.
Not knowing that files you shared were copyrighted is some amount of excuse (if I give you some music, claiming that it is in the public domain, you share it, and it turns out that I lied to you, that is an excuse for you).
Not knowing that you are sharing files _is_ an excuse (unless you should have known).
'' Copyrighted files on a shared folder is indeed not equal to sharing copyrighted files. However doesn't this show "intent to share" ? Don't know a lot on the US justice system (criminal, civil etc.) but I guess the proverb "stupidity doesn't mean innocense" still holds. To me it seems the plaintiff needs to prove actual sharing in order to get damages (?) ''
This seems a bit mixed up. First, having a shared folder does _not_ mean "intent to share". Even if it means "intent to share", it doesn't mean that any sharing and any copyright violation happened. If I offer everyone on Slashdot to copy my complete music collection, and nobody takes up the offer, then no copyright violation has happened. On the other hand, many on Slashdot have in the past argued that having an unprotected open wireless connection shows "intent to share", but they are wrong, and courts have decided they are wrong.
And that seems to be exactly the point that the judge made: There was a report saying that the defendant had file sharing turned on. The defendant complained because she was afraid someone might conclude that file sharing had actually happened. The judge rejected her complaint because _nobody could legally draw that conclusion_. Exactly as you said, the plaintiffs need to show that actual copyright violation happened, or has most likely happened.
Seriously. If anyone other than Microsoft had produced this abomination, then it would already have disappeared from the market completely. The only thing that keeps it alive is this weird expectation that because it is a Microsoft product, it automatically has to destroy all the competition. And here on Slashdot, someone even tried to raise sympathies for this product by calling it "the underdog". Underdog? Microsoft and underdog? For f***s sake, what is wrong with some people's brains?
Take this player on its own merits, and you will see that except for one innovation (brown color) there is absolutely nothing exciting about it.
Q. What do I have to do to copy music to another player wirelessly?
A. Buy two Zunes, because you can be sure nobody else has one.
Then I'd ask you to fix the bugs in it, and to explain what it does.
If you can explain it, you have a good chance of getting hired for certain jobs.
If you can't explain it, then we can both have a good laugh about your joke, and I can look at the next candidate.
'' 7 or so years ago I heard a great quote about this problem. "Technically, the nerds arguing that the new millennium doesn't start for another year are correct, but the rest of the world will party anyway." '' One of the stupid new Labour bitches said the celebration was for Jesus Christ's 2000th birthday. That was wrong on so many levels, it was unbelievable.
'' Was with my wife at the store getting a tree. Saw batteries; If I recall, 10 for 6.99 and 16 for 8.99.
:-(
She didn't know which was cheaper. ''
I think the easiest way to explain it that only requires multiplication and works with arbitrary amounts is this:
You could buy 16 packs of ten batteries, or you could buy 10 packs of 16 batteries. (You don't need to calculate how many batteries that is; the important thing is that it is the same number). So you need to compare 16 time 6.99 and 10 times 8.99.
I once saw a report in a TV show about an experiment they made in a shop: They put up a big sign "3 tins for 0.99" and a small sign "1 tin for 0.30". The shop sold more packs of three tins for 0.99
Gunther Beckstein is _not_ the German minister of interior. He is the Bavarian minister of interior, which is not quite the same. Just as Arnold Schwarzenegger is not President of the USA.
And, as the article says, this is not suggestion a law, it is meant as a "basis for discussion".
My answer to that is very short: IEEE 754.
'' ... where you can actually determine meaningful values for 0/0 in specific cases via calculus? ''
No, you can't.
You can determine lim f (x) / g (x) in certain cases where lim f (x) = 0 and lim g (x) = 0. This has nothing to do with 0/0.
'' So, according to that, the following would hold:
if 1/0 = infinity
then infinity * 0 = 1
which does not work, for obvious reasons. This I told my teacher in 6th grade. ''
If you read his article, you will find that he very carefully removes everything from the rules of arithmetic that would cause this kind of problems, which makes it at the same time correct and absolutely useless. His article isn't wrong, it is just useless.
We define three new quantities: An enormous pile of crap, a negative pile of crap, and a pile of crap of unknown size.
0/0 is a pile of crap of unknown size.
a/0 is an enormous pile of crap if a > 0, and a negative pile of crap if a 0.
Any operation involving a pile of crap of unknown size produces a pile of crap of unknown size.
Adding anything to an enormous pile of crap gives an enormous pile of crap; adding anything to a negative pile of crap gives a negative pile of crap, the only exception is that adding an enormous pile of crap and a negative pile of crap gives a pile of crap of unknown size.
Piles of crap of unknown size cannot be compared to anything.
Multiplying any pile of crap by zero gives a pile of crap of unknown size.
Do I need to continue?
Basically, he has done something in a way quite similar to the IEEE 754 Standard, by defining Infinities and NaNs. However, he didn't define positive and negative zeroes, which makes the whole thing much less useful. And the rules for arithmetic are full of exception after exception, except that he claims the exceptions are part of the rules and therefore not exceptions.
Did I mention a pile of crap of unknown size?
'' Just curious, can this be done in Java? ''
Yes. Even better, in Java it is portable and guaranteed to work.
Java has explicit functions to get the bit-representations of a float or double in a 32 bit or 64 bit integer and to create a float or double value from its bit-representation.
'' Definitely not clearer to someone well-versed in C, but also is not considered portable (I think -- it's been a few years since I was up on the C Standard). I believe C doesn't guarantee that all the union elements will be on the same alignment. The compiler will (probably) choose to do it that way, but it doesn't have to. ''
How would you suggest that elements of a union could possible have different alignment, since they have the same address?
The reason why it is non-portable is that the C Standard explicitely says that assigning to one element of a union and then reading another element is undefined behavior (with the exception of certain cases with elements that are structs). The "* (int *) &x" is non-portable for exactly the same reason (because the C Standard says so).
'' When this software code it turned into a hardware circuit and patented then the magic number on this line,"i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1);" will be the focus of the patent on the hardware circuit. It becomes very important to know who managed to skillfully approximate that mathematical technique with the code. ''
That is of course pure nonsense, because a hardware implementation will just take the lowest bit of the exponent and a few bits of the mantissa as an index into a lookup-table to get two coefficients for a stepwise linear function.
Just follow it step by step.
In an IEEE 32-bit floating point number, the highest bit is the sign bit. The next eight bits are the exponent adjusted by 0x7f, and the remaining 23 bits are the lower 23 bits of the mantissa. If you have a number x = 2^k * (1 + m / 2^23), then the floating point representation is highest bit = 0, next 8 bit = k + 0x7f, remaining 23 bits = m. That means you get
i = ((k + 0x7f) * 2^23) + m = (k > 1) and interprets it as a floating-point number. First we examine what happens if we multiply x by 4: The exponent of x, that is k, is increased by two. i is increased by (2 > 1) = 0x1fc00000 + m/2, and l = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1) = 0x3f7759df - m/2 = 0x3f000000 + 0x007759df - m/2. m/2 is between 0 and 0x003fffff, so the exponent field is equal to 0x3f000000. Interpreted as a floating-point number, it is (1/2) + (1 + (0x007759df - m/2) / 2^23) = (1/2) * (1.932430 - m/2^24) = (1/2) * (1.932430 - (x - 1)*2^23/2^24) = 1.216215 - x/4 after some length calculation. Now if you draw graphs of 1/sqrt (x) and 1.216215 - x/4 for 1 0x003759df.
However, with all that said, on a modern CPU this code might not be running too fast, because you need to write a floating-point register to memory, read back to an integer register, write back to memory, and read back to a floating-point register; that is not usually that a modern CPU likes to do. Both PowerPC and Intel/AMD CPUs have a vector instruction that will calculate an approximate inverse square root for four floating-point values simultaneously, with higher precision than this code does.
'' Why does the coder use
int i = *(int*)
instead of just
int i = (int)x; ''
Get your copy of the C Standard out, or any book about C, and figure out for yourself what each of these statements does.
Maybe you can try a few different values for x, like 0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 and print * (int *) &x, preferably in hexadecimal format; that should give you some hint.
'' The problem that I can see is that if you eliminated patents altogether, it might lead companies to be very, very aggressive about preventing the disclosure of trade secrets. Working for an electronics firm would be like joining the Manhattan Project, and every device you bought would have all of its circuit boards potted in epoxy, mixed with iron filings to mess up X-rays and PET scanners. They'd probably also self-destruct if you opened the case. Industrial espionage would be de rigeur. ''
Most things that could be protected by reasonable software patents are actually protected by copyright law. The only difference is, if I have a simple idea and spend six months implementing it, with patent laws you are not allowed to implement the same simple idea, with copyright law you have the right to spend six months as well implementing it, without copyright law you would have the right to steal it.
In Germany, an additional protection is the law "against unfair competition". This used to protect software developers before it was clear that software has copyright (if I spend six months developing software before I sell it, and you just copy it and sell, then this is unfair competition). This would automatically protect inventions that took effort to develop (possibly just the effort of hiring someone really clever for $100,000 a year than someone much less clever for $40,000) from being ripped off.
'' Strikes me as true, and as always when claiming something is obvious, it begs the question "how come you didn't think of it then?" ''
Who says nobody has ever thought of it? I have a question: Have you ever thought of painting your shoes yellow? Probably not. On the other hand, if you went to a fancy dress party and needed yellow shoes to match your costume, then you would do exactly that. Are you saying that painting your shoes yellow could be patented because nobody thought of it before? That's nonsense. It is obvious, whether anyone thought of it, whether anyone wrote it down, or not.
'' UN sells in .1uCi amount, and according to our beloved Wikipedia, the lethal dose for INGESTED is .03uCi (assuming that 3 people in Chicago mistake Osama's gift cards for deep dish pizza and he has a very very fine razor blade to cut the sample into three parts). ''
No, 0.03 microcurie is _not_ the lethal dosis. 0.03 microcuries is the maximum that you are _allowed_ to swallow without the company you work at getting into trouble if it is found inside you.
Let's say you work at a company manufacturing rat poison. Obviously, some amount of rat poisin could enter your body. Tiny amounts _will_ enter your body. Health and safety authorities will have set a limit of how much rat poison is allowed to be in the body of the workers, without negative consequences to the company. That amount will be far, far, far away from a lethal dosis. It will be the maximum amount that doesn't affect you, not the smallest amount that kills you.
As the article says, these guys are selling quantities of 0.1 microcurie. The maximum allowable dose for ingested Polonium-210 is 0.03 microcurie according to Wikipedia. (Quote: The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1,100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10-12 gram. )
Note that "Maximum allowable body burden" is far from lethal. That is the amount where your employer has some explaining to do if you work at some place using polonium and that amount is found inside you; on the other hand, 0.02 microcurie would be considered fine. So eating one of those 0.1 microcurie things will be unhealthy, but I don't think it would do you permanent harm.
I was told that there are about 300 million guns around in the USA, and each one is capable of doing a lot more damage than 0.1 microcurie of polonium.