Just when it looks like the patent mess can't get any weirder, it does. I'm just waiting for some Tuttle/Buttle prosecution that's upheld.
Although in the USA, the day may be closer than we think: we have the Great and Wonderful Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In response to DNA evidence that cleared a man on death row, he said that mere innocence is no grounds to overturn a judgement.
Gyrocopters are one of the most dangerous aviation vehicles available.
Besides being complete nonsense, this is also logically bogus. Something has to be "the most dangerous" -- so what?
They are not safe and DO STALL!
It's completely obvious you have absolutely no knowledge in these matters. You do not automatically die if your aircraft stalls, contrary to what Hollywood might try to tell you. Your messages boil down to nothing more than "YOU WILL FRIGGEN DIE!!!!!!!! if you stop breathing."
Gyrocopters are dangerous. Very dangerous! And yes, they nto only stall, but FALL OUT OF THE FRIGGEN AIR!
Incidentally, I am a pilot. Any pilot flying has stalled an airplane many hundreds of times. Any rotary-wing pilot has autorotated many hundreds of times. Many pilots have spun airplanes. Many of us actually spin them for fun! We even turn the engine off (well, retard the throttle to simulate engine off) in flight, many many times. And you know what? We don't just "FALL OUT OF THE FRIGGEN AIR!" Sure, if you stall -- or let your rotor speed decay -- close to the ground and you'll be in pain. That's why we have instructors.
Why don't you go down to your local small airport and take an intro flight? Fixed wing or rotary, your choice. You can see for yourself how it all works.
Except that helicopters can fly well, both against and with the wind. Gyrocopters can not. If a gyrocopter flies into too much wind, it can cause a rotor stall; but requires fairly high winds which would still be flyable by planes and helicopters. If you fly with a tail wind, you can EASILY lose lift AND forward momentum and fall from the air with a rotor stall.
Ignorance is not a vice; we all have to learn some time. But which kind of idiot calls this "informative"? (Four of them!)
When an aircraft is airborne -- whether fixed-wing or rotary -- it knows nothing about the wind. Just like a ship moving on the ocean knows nothing about any ocean currents it may be in. The only thing an aircraft can sense is a change in wind velocity. A steady wind is just an inertial frame as good as any other.
Or do you think that if you're in the back seat of a bus that's moving faster than you can throw a ball, you can't hit that clown in the front seat?
There are lots of decent ways of building strong yet easy to remember passwords. Two unrelated words stuck together, perhaps with some 'leetspeak:
cowT4ble
Pronounceable nonsense words:
magRutzky
The initial letters and punctuation from a phrase:
"A man, a plan, a canal - Panama!" => Am,ap,ac-P!
Lots of other ways too, I'm sure. The problem is that you need to have users that actually care about security. As long as people give passwords to friends and write them on post-it notes (even passwords like the cat's name!) it's a losing game. Sysadmins must make sure that the system is safe from all non-root users on the system.
The thing that continually intrigues me about the GPL is how people seem to reject it rather than embracing all the benefits that it provides while also addressing its drawbacks. I think it does have drawbacks...
I think that if you want to talk about drawbacks and benefits of software licenses, you first have to define your goal. And then you need to tell us what these drawbacks are and why they keep the GPL from attaining this goal.
RMS' occasionally overblown ego certainly doesn't help the cause, kind of like Steven Wolfram...great work...horrible attitude
RMS has an ego just like everyone else, and based on what he's actually accomplished, he's entitled to quite a large one. He may be disagreeable, but you know there's no hidden agenda: you know exactly what he wants. He wants everyone to share ideas freely: you can think of it as a strong "anti-IP" position: ownership is only for physical artifacts, not ideas. No patents, no copyrights. Programming will be like academic publishing and art used to be: good artists borrow, great artists steal. Or what Jefferson wrote:
... no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me.
The tool RMS invented to achieve this was the GPL: using copyright law to subvert the idea of copyrights, creating an entirely separate body of work that everyone "possesses." A parallel body of work that cannot be used by the "pro-IP" people. You may not agree with this goal, in which case the GPL is not the license you should use, and in that case you are not allowed to benefit from the work of the "anti-IP" group. Copyright law is used to enforce this restriction.
So: what is your goal for free software licenses, and what are your GPL drawbacks?
So, pretty much everyone will get filled up on points and have to license. There goes the state. And, NO, this will not stop anyone from speeding.
Using a universal car monitoring system to hand out speeding fines means that politicians and CEOs will also get tickets. You can bet any system that annoys those two groups will get fixed: maybe it would cause speed limits to be rationalised so 80% of the vehicles drive at or below the speed limit. (I believe laws in various states require this but various considerations -- local government revenue from fines -- cause it to not actually happen.)
Bullshit. Trusted Computing means that corporations know exactly what software you're running. When they say "we only support IE6 on Windows" it will mean that if you're not running approved software -- all the way down to the hardware, no interpreters or VMWare or any such -- you can't go to their web site or use their services. Free software will go back to being a hobby instead of a commercial contender. And DRM enforcement becomes trivial. Trusted Computing buys me nothing.
For more details on how this works and why it's unbreakable (given suitable hardware) read Seth Schoen's paper on Trusted Computing (NGSCB, used to be called Palladium).
One thing that is thourougly proven, is that any copy-protection scheme developed as up to date, has been and can be broken. Future DRMs might require nastier hacks, but I'd still be surprised if they weren't bypassable or breakable.
Actually I do have faith in hacker culture. Unfortunately I also know crypto. Just because DVD-CSS is a broken insecure piece of crap doesn't mean all DRM formats will be. At my last job I designed a crypto protocol for DRM that is unbreakable. The only requirement is for a little crypto processor chip to be present in the device (sound card, video card, etc.) -- $2 or so in quantity. Yes this will take a few years and yes, you always have the option to not buy content and not to go to secure web sites. We need to get off our complacent asses and start campaigning against NGSCB/TCPA/TCG. Becoming a member of EFF would be a good start. ReadSeth Schoen's paper.
Here's how you do it: first you introduce a new audio format with secure DRM with a higher bit-rate or more than 16 bits or a smaller device -- anything to make the masses think it's better. Then you phase out older non-DRM formats. It'll take more than a year or two, but a corporation can afford to wait. Sure, you have to option to not buy DRM'ed formats -- just like today you have the option to not buy from RIAA members and convicted monopolists.
The magic of crypto! It's not just a question of writing a value like "42" -- instead it will be like a challenge/response between the application and the crypto processor.
Yeah, "optional." The way it (the thing they used to call Palladium, I don't remember what it's called now) works is: there's write-once storage in a crypto processor on the motherboard and as the machine boots each software component (BIOS, kernel, application) writes a crypto-secure signature to it. Applications can read this string of signatures. Visiting a bank web-site (or music shop or ticketmaster or...) your machine would be required to present a valid string of signatures. This allows them to ensure you're running exactly what they want. "We only support IE6 on Windows" -- now you can't get past an IE-only website by simply setting your User-Agent header. You, the owner, are welcome to disable it -- but now you can't do any online banking or music purchase, or.... This means we're welcome to screw around with our little free software hobby, but in the real world you will have to enable DRM and run approved software.
Personally, I'll never buy any DRM-based media (movies, music, cable TV, etc.), so I don't ever intend to have DRM-enabled hardware.
What I'm afraid of is that it will become the only way content is available. Phase out un-encrypted CDs. Fix the DVD-CSS security hole. Voila! No more fair-use.
... if a fault condition can be prevented before a user can commit the error, set the interface so that the fault cannot be committed in the first place. It is very annoying to hit a connect button only to be told that there are no connection settings.
All well and good, but...
I can't count the number of times I've heard someone (including me) scream "Goddamn you stupid piece of shit! Why is that button grey'ed out? I want to connect, there's a button named 'connect' but it's not working." I have yet to see a system that explained to the user (in some nice unobtrusive way) why I couldn't do something. I suppose you could have a tooltop pop up and explain not just what it is but why it's greyed out, perhaps with a link to more extensive documentation that explains how to set up connection settings. I've never seen it, though. Instead of usability we get more eye candy and those godawful skins.
I'm going to try to not rant on skins except to say the person who thought tiny dark-green LCD-style text on a black background is what a media player should like should be taken out back and shot. In the balls.
(Oh yeah, I've been writing software for decades now and have been not just complimented but paid handsomely. Maybe I'm just bitter because my ancient eyes can't read that stupid tiny dark-green on black LCD crap. And because I have a PhD in user interface design and implementation.)
Foul slander. (Or is it libel?) They used to a garage called "Hacker's Haven" in Cambridge where people could go borrow tools and work on their own cars (they say they quit because they realised that with all the help they had to provide, they were better off fixing those cars themselves). Ray is, in fact, still a mechanic, and runs the Good News Garage; and Tommy is no dunce either. Just because they're funny doesn't mean they're idiots!
I was a little pissed off with them when they switched to Windows Media for their shows on the web. (I haven't been able to get MPlayer to play it but WiMP works with Crossover so it's still possible to listen.)
It'a also so hard to keep track of who the enemies are. We know now that Saddam's Iraq is an enemy, whereas it was a friend in the 80s. I think Iran is a friend, at least until a month before the elections when I think they will become an Immediate Threat to Democracy and Freedom (tm). But what about Spain? Are they our enemies, or are they still part of the COW (coalition of the willing)? Perhaps we need to invade, I mean liberate, Catalonia.
Re:You're Talking About Math In General, Right?
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And the fact that someone with an undergrad degree in Math is not knowledgable enough to read your average journal paper is symptomatic of a serious problem.
My original message may have been unclear: I was a mathematician in a former life, and the area (set theory) is near and dear to my heart. If there is a lot of jargon and notation in a math proof it's because we haven't found a better way to talk about those ideas in an unambiguous manner. Just like music: it may look arcane and 'leet, but it's the best way we know of so if you want to be a musician you learn to read music.
I don't agree that a math undergrad should be able to read a research paper with no additional preparation. Math is a large enough field that no one person can stay abreast of all of it, so even a professional mathematician should expect to spend a little time learning the details of notation if reading a paper outside his or her field.
Now, about technology making it easy to find errors in proofs -- I'm sceptical. We must keep in mind that math is still a form of human expression, it's still more like a natural language than a formal one. I'd expect a mechanical universal proof-checker when we see something that can read a whodunit and identify flaws in the plot and character development.
You've misunderstood me: in a former life I was one so I know math doesn't use jargon to appear 'leet. My objection is that this hack does see to be using it that way -- there's absolutely no reason to write a plain-language book with crap like "2c." instead of a chapter name. Ditto garbage like IYI, which isn't even standard math jargon so I kept tripping over it.
Bah! I thought it used so-so writing style combined with the overuse of the worst of the opacity of math notation. We use notation because we don't know any better way to communicate, not because we think talking 'leet jargon is kewl. So instead of helpful chapters and sections with names we get crap like "3b." And he cross-references to things like "as we talked about in 2c." Try shuffling throught the book trying to find that damn "2c". I wanted to throw the thing across the room when I was reading it. I wanted so much to like it... I was hoping it would be a decent popular account of infinite sets (and related concepts) so my friends could see how cool this shit is, instead of thinking (as they do now) that I'm speaking in tongues.
This book will just convince people who read it that this stuff is obscure jargon-ridden crap that only lunatics are involved in... stay out, because you're too stupid to understand all this.
I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way
You might want to distinguish between composing and typesetting. Nothing beats manuscript paper and pen for composing. As Han-Wen says,
Even in the age of computers, classical composers still write music by scribbling stacks of note-paper full with ideas and fragments, and piecing those bits together to a full score. It's a very laborious process, but computers cannot give them the same overview as a bunch of paper fragments spread out over a desk would do.
Lilypond is a typesetting system. The composer sends the completed music to the typesetter/engraver who makes it look nice.
I have a lot of music that's hard to read, or scribbled on some paper, or whatever. Transcribing music into the computer is so much easier with Lilypond that with WYSIWYG programs! My hands stay on the keyboard, I look at the music and type
\time 4/4 \key g\major \tempo 4=140 % metronome marking g2\pp \< c8 r8 b4 \! % G half note pp and crescendo to g2\ff( a4 b4) % G half note ff. The G and quarter notes A and B are slurred ...
On a WYSIWYG system, think about all the mousing and clicking to select and place key and time signatures, metronome marking, three different note durations, a crescendo, a slur, and dynamics. (The percent sign introduces a comment.) Placing an accent on a note? That's just a character. Repeats? That's one word volta. And so on.
While the printed output is asthetically pleasing, it strikes me as an odd technology to persue, because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music... It's not truly a necessity anymore, with a good ear and modern equipment, ideas can quickly be stored for future embellishment or shown to others in the absence of an actual instrument.
One of the most significant milestones of human development was the invention of written language. It allowed us to move beyond the oral traditions; it let us create more complex and involved works -- I don't believe Shakespeare would have been the same if his society hadn't had writing. Similarly you don't really need a printed score for sixteen bars of melody over some chords if you have a good ear and modern equipment. Larger works are more problematic though. And how can you talk about something if you don't have a language to write it down in?
Slashdot Mirror
Although in the USA, the day may be closer than we think: we have the Great and Wonderful Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In response to DNA evidence that cleared a man on death row, he said that mere innocence is no grounds to overturn a judgement.
Why don't you go down to your local small airport and take an intro flight? Fixed wing or rotary, your choice. You can see for yourself how it all works.
When an aircraft is airborne -- whether fixed-wing or rotary -- it knows nothing about the wind. Just like a ship moving on the ocean knows nothing about any ocean currents it may be in. The only thing an aircraft can sense is a change in wind velocity. A steady wind is just an inertial frame as good as any other.
Or do you think that if you're in the back seat of a bus that's moving faster than you can throw a ball, you can't hit that clown in the front seat?
No! Now for the religious wars on sewups vs clinchers....
Lots of other ways too, I'm sure. The problem is that you need to have users that actually care about security. As long as people give passwords to friends and write them on post-it notes (even passwords like the cat's name!) it's a losing game. Sysadmins must make sure that the system is safe from all non-root users on the system.
So: what is your goal for free software licenses, and what are your GPL drawbacks?
Bullshit. Trusted Computing means that corporations know exactly what software you're running. When they say "we only support IE6 on Windows" it will mean that if you're not running approved software -- all the way down to the hardware, no interpreters or VMWare or any such -- you can't go to their web site or use their services. Free software will go back to being a hobby instead of a commercial contender. And DRM enforcement becomes trivial. Trusted Computing buys me nothing.
For more details on how this works and why it's unbreakable (given suitable hardware) read Seth Schoen's paper on Trusted Computing (NGSCB, used to be called Palladium).
The magic of crypto! It's not just a question of writing a value like "42" -- instead it will be like a challenge/response between the application and the crypto processor.
I'm going to try to not rant on skins except to say the person who thought tiny dark-green LCD-style text on a black background is what a media player should like should be taken out back and shot. In the balls.
(Oh yeah, I've been writing software for decades now and have been not just complimented but paid handsomely. Maybe I'm just bitter because my ancient eyes can't read that stupid tiny dark-green on black LCD crap. And because I have a PhD in user interface design and implementation.)
I was a little pissed off with them when they switched to Windows Media for their shows on the web. (I haven't been able to get MPlayer to play it but WiMP works with Crossover so it's still possible to listen.)
It'a also so hard to keep track of who the enemies are. We know now that Saddam's Iraq is an enemy, whereas it was a friend in the 80s. I think Iran is a friend, at least until a month before the elections when I think they will become an Immediate Threat to Democracy and Freedom (tm). But what about Spain? Are they our enemies, or are they still part of the COW (coalition of the willing)? Perhaps we need to invade, I mean liberate, Catalonia.
I don't agree that a math undergrad should be able to read a research paper with no additional preparation. Math is a large enough field that no one person can stay abreast of all of it, so even a professional mathematician should expect to spend a little time learning the details of notation if reading a paper outside his or her field.
Now, about technology making it easy to find errors in proofs -- I'm sceptical. We must keep in mind that math is still a form of human expression, it's still more like a natural language than a formal one. I'd expect a mechanical universal proof-checker when we see something that can read a whodunit and identify flaws in the plot and character development.
You've misunderstood me: in a former life I was one so I know math doesn't use jargon to appear 'leet. My objection is that this hack does see to be using it that way -- there's absolutely no reason to write a plain-language book with crap like "2c." instead of a chapter name. Ditto garbage like IYI, which isn't even standard math jargon so I kept tripping over it.
Yeah, and if my grandma had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
This book will just convince people who read it that this stuff is obscure jargon-ridden crap that only lunatics are involved in... stay out, because you're too stupid to understand all this.
I have a lot of music that's hard to read, or scribbled on some paper, or whatever. Transcribing music into the computer is so much easier with Lilypond that with WYSIWYG programs! My hands stay on the keyboard, I look at the music and type
On a WYSIWYG system, think about all the mousing and clicking to select and place key and time signatures, metronome marking, three different note durations, a crescendo, a slur, and dynamics. (The percent sign introduces a comment.) Placing an accent on a note? That's just a character. Repeats? That's one word volta. And so on.