In a commercial hardware product, that means that the company can insist on only distributing the code by sending it to you as a bunch of floppy disks, for all the GPL cares.
This goes against the spirit of the GPL.... To take your example to the extreme, suppose that they made the code available via 3of9 barcode in printed format? stone tablet (mailed to you via overnight delivery at your expense)? 8" floppy disks? download via modem @ 300bps at $19.95/minute? Maybe stone tablets aren't machine readable but the rest are.
It's the "complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code" and "a medium customarily used for software interchange" you quoted that explain it. How many computers have floppy disks these days? Mine doesn't. When was the last time you saw anyone exchange code on a floppy disk?
The instructions for what to do if you think you have found a gpl violation are here. There is no mention of posting to slashdot on that page. There is a mention of checking your facts first... some companies get a bit cross (eg they'll take you to court) if you write anything bad about their product which isn't completely true. (i'm not saying it isn't, i'm just saying you don't appear to have done your homework yet).
You're looking at the problem from completely the wrong angle. If getting people into seats is the problem, then we need to get rid of seats. Imagine the benefits: . Greatly simplifies boarding . Greatly increases carrying capacity - everyone is standing up. . A hydraulic ram could be used to make sure people are occupying the minimum area possible . A big hose spraying gatorade or something similar could keep people fed and watered . At unloading time, the floor of the plane could open up and dump everyone onto the tarmac. With careful arrangement of the wheels, the plane wouldn't even have to come to a complete stop to do this.
I don't think you understand the problem... a diode isn't going to help here.
All the EEG units i've seen (which isn't many) have battery operated sensors with an optically isolated connection to the processor, which is the only way you can be really safe.
The EEG sensors that i'm familiar with require a conductive gel between them and your head. This greatly reduces the voltage required to give you serious problems. The concern is that an errant voltage (lightning strike, power surge, equipment failure) poses a much more serious threat once you have reduced the resistance between the equipment and your body.
RSI may one day be a thing of the past, but i'd be concerned about the chance of a severe electric shock. Have a read around the DIY EEG pages... there is a lot of concern about optically isolated sensors etc.
The problem is that you normally attach the sensors to your head with a conductive gel or something similar, so if the system fails in such a way that a large voltage potential develops between two sesors, or a sensor and ground, the path to your insides (eg your brain) has a lot less resistance than dry skin.
I'm sure that for $300 you'll be getting top class equipment with all the appropriate protection, but just wait until the cheap knockoffs start hitting the market.
then you clearly don't care about free speech. You're no better than those arresting people for reading the first amendment aloud.
My understanding of the meaning 'free speech' is that you have the right to say something, and I have the right not to listen. If you take away my right not to listen then it really isn't free.
I have the right to slam the door in their face and choose not to "receive the message".
Sure you do. Just like you can delete your own unwanted email. It remains unconstitutional to jail them for merely making their pitch in your presence.
The point is that you have to read the subject of the email, and you often have to open it before you actually figure out is spam. Something with subject containing the word 'V1@gr@' is obviously spam, something with a subject of 'An important message from Ebay' isn't so obvious (and is illegal for other reasons).
Just as an aside, my wife has been receiving snailmail postcards from 'Patrick & Daniel', in a handwritten printer font (but at a glance it looks like handwriting). Took her a few minutes to figure out that it's actually from Telstra (Telco here in Australia) advertising broadband in rural areas. It seems like even snail mail is copying ideas from the spammers - gone are the days when snail mail spam had things like 'You could already be a winner!' written on it and you could just chuck it straight in the recycling...
Really, Vista is the biggest "meh" in computer history.
And yet we're still talking about it...
Slashdot | Vista SP1 Is Even Less Compatible Slashdot | Microsoft Cuts Vista Price In 70 Countries Slashdot | Did Amazon Induce Vista's Premature Birth? Slashdot | "Vista Capable" Lawsuit Is Now a Class Action Slashdot | Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista Slashdot | Microsoft Had Doubts About the 'Vista Capable' Label Slashdot | Microsoft Pulls Vista SP1 Update Slashdot | Hostile ta Vista, Baby Slashdot | Windows Vista Annoyances Slashdot | Vista SP1 Update Locks Out Some Users
and that's just the first page of Google results!
In fact, in the past 12 months, there have been 'about 231' slashdot articles with 'Vista' in the title, according to Google. that is vs 'about 339' for linux, and 'about 192' for apple. (also, about 'about 1' for 'a life':)
Also, punitive awards should go to the government - either regulatory agencies or law enforcement, not the victims.
I've had the same thoughts before, that the defendant deserves to get punished, but that the victim doesn't deserve to be rewarded to that degree. My solution would be that the victim gets to nominate a charity and the money gets directed to them.
I wonder how that would change our court-happy society - if the victim knew that even if they won, they'd only more or less get compensated for their losses, they probably wouldn't get the punitive damages themselves.
"Fantasia." In _The Sorceror's Apprentice,_ Mickey Mouse decides that the best way to deal with an out-of-control magic broom is to chop it into thousands of pieces... all of which just keep right on going, making the problem worse instead of better.
I liked the Itchy and Scratchy version better. It makes a better analogy too - when we breathe in the little tiny pieces of satellite, they will dissolve us from the inside out!
I would imagine that pirating Vista, or even a service pack for Vista, is more fun that actually using it!
Re:Trust simulation and purpose-blindness
on
Ethics In IT
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· Score: 1
You're allowed to access Scientology's Web page to read it, but not to repeatedly reload it just to put load on their server and run up their bandwidth bill. But neither your browser (or wget) nor their server necessarily understand that.
Now, something like the waste cooking oil I could see being useful
How much waste cooking oil are you using over there? I'm driving about 600-700km/week lately in a company vehicle, and going through quite a bit of fuel. At home, we (family of 6) use around 1L of cooking oil directly a week, and maybe another 1L indirectly (eg by buying foods that have been cooked in oil). Of that oil, probably only around 75% could actually be re-used. So that leaves a fairly large deficit...
Untrue. The information is spread into the pixels over which it is blurred. With the appropriate convolution matrix, you can recover the pinsharp picture
All that article says is that you can make the image clearer. It even says that the zooming in that you see on the crime tv shows is not possible.
If you had a high enough resolution you might be able to apply a convolution matrix to the problem to 're-focus' it, but once you have the image in a digital form with a finite resolution, you can't do that much with it.
And what the crime tv shows do is 'zoom' in, which is different to re-focusing an image. They show an image being zoomed down to about 16x16 pixels and some magic software re-computes it into a high res image. As cool as it looks, it just can't be done. Just think of all the possible images that those 16x16 pixels could represent!
That's the thing about slashdot. I could have pretended to post an excerpt that read "the US acknowledged that at least 2 of the 'broken' cables were caused by failed attempts to splice and intercept communications", and at least 2 people would have believed it!
You are looking at a very small picture. If the police abuse this technology, anyone near the gps coordinates where a crime is committed is instantly a suspect.
So what? Would you rather be a suspect because someone said you were there, or because you were there? That would never hold up in court anyway, a cellphone isn't a person. I assumed we were talking now about gps stuff permanent attached to cars.
I had to rush someone to the hospital a few days ago. I broke the speed limit. Should my cell phone be telling the cops how evil of a person I am and mail me a ticket?
Surely the price of a speeding ticket, if it came to that, would be worth the value of getting your ill person to hospital on time? Unless you were _really_ speeding, then you're just asking for trouble - no point trying to get to hospital on time if you kill someone on the way!
There was a case in Australia a few years back where a policeman pulled over a father trying to get his son to the hospital. The son was having an asthma attack and was in a pretty bad way, but the cop didn't buy it and mucked around for ages. IIRC he got in a heap of trouble for that. I don't know where you call home but over here in Australia I think we're a pretty laid back sort of people... stuff like that makes the news over here!
You just _try_ to come take my car away... we'll have some fun, I guarantee it.
We all signed up to (approximately) the same rules when we got our licenses. So play nice.
Fortunately, I won't be the one taking your car away. I don't know what the rules are you where you are, but some states over here (Australia) have implemented anti-'hoon' laws, which go something like if you are caught drag racing or being obviously dangerous on the road (eg not just 20kph over the limit) you'll get your car taken away for a while. Do it again and you'll get it taken away again and this time it will be destroyed. Very satisfying to hear about:)
it's the difference in speed that causes accidents.
Every 1mph you increase your speed is a 1mph increase in the speed difference between you and the trees and light posts you are flying past. Or the car by the side of the road just over the hill on a very narrow shoulder who's just blown a tyre or broken down.
Speaking of blown tyres... there is a fair difference between a blowout at 55mph and 80mph, or even just a brief aquaplane over some water or a slide in some gravel that you didn't notice around a bend.
Have you ever seen how pissed off some cops get when they've just pulled someone over for doing 20mph over the limit? You'd think they'd be happy to be writing another ticket, but they're not. They get tired of getting called out to accidents because another dickhead thought he was perfectly safe doing 80mph in a 55mph zone.
Which means, if you apply a force in one direction, the acceleration would go in the opposite direction.
I'm not sure that that is correct. It's probably Newtons fault for not including an exemption in his equations when dealing with negative mass, but I think we can forgive him that.
Slashdot Mirror
If only they hadn't been given that trillion dollar bill...
This goes against the spirit of the GPL.... To take your example to the extreme, suppose that they made the code available via 3of9 barcode in printed format? stone tablet (mailed to you via overnight delivery at your expense)? 8" floppy disks? download via modem @ 300bps at $19.95/minute? Maybe stone tablets aren't machine readable but the rest are.
It's the "complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code" and "a medium customarily used for software interchange" you quoted that explain it. How many computers have floppy disks these days? Mine doesn't. When was the last time you saw anyone exchange code on a floppy disk?
The instructions for what to do if you think you have found a gpl violation are here. There is no mention of posting to slashdot on that page. There is a mention of checking your facts first... some companies get a bit cross (eg they'll take you to court) if you write anything bad about their product which isn't completely true. (i'm not saying it isn't, i'm just saying you don't appear to have done your homework yet).
You're looking at the problem from completely the wrong angle. If getting people into seats is the problem, then we need to get rid of seats. Imagine the benefits:
. Greatly simplifies boarding
. Greatly increases carrying capacity - everyone is standing up.
. A hydraulic ram could be used to make sure people are occupying the minimum area possible
. A big hose spraying gatorade or something similar could keep people fed and watered
. At unloading time, the floor of the plane could open up and dump everyone onto the tarmac. With careful arrangement of the wheels, the plane wouldn't even have to come to a complete stop to do this.
I think maybe it's more like Google Sky.
I don't think you understand the problem... a diode isn't going to help here.
All the EEG units i've seen (which isn't many) have battery operated sensors with an optically isolated connection to the processor, which is the only way you can be really safe.
The EEG sensors that i'm familiar with require a conductive gel between them and your head. This greatly reduces the voltage required to give you serious problems. The concern is that an errant voltage (lightning strike, power surge, equipment failure) poses a much more serious threat once you have reduced the resistance between the equipment and your body.
RSI may one day be a thing of the past, but i'd be concerned about the chance of a severe electric shock. Have a read around the DIY EEG pages... there is a lot of concern about optically isolated sensors etc.
The problem is that you normally attach the sensors to your head with a conductive gel or something similar, so if the system fails in such a way that a large voltage potential develops between two sesors, or a sensor and ground, the path to your insides (eg your brain) has a lot less resistance than dry skin.
I'm sure that for $300 you'll be getting top class equipment with all the appropriate protection, but just wait until the cheap knockoffs start hitting the market.
My understanding of the meaning 'free speech' is that you have the right to say something, and I have the right not to listen. If you take away my right not to listen then it really isn't free.
The point is that you have to read the subject of the email, and you often have to open it before you actually figure out is spam. Something with subject containing the word 'V1@gr@' is obviously spam, something with a subject of 'An important message from Ebay' isn't so obvious (and is illegal for other reasons).
Just as an aside, my wife has been receiving snailmail postcards from 'Patrick & Daniel', in a handwritten printer font (but at a glance it looks like handwriting). Took her a few minutes to figure out that it's actually from Telstra (Telco here in Australia) advertising broadband in rural areas. It seems like even snail mail is copying ideas from the spammers - gone are the days when snail mail spam had things like 'You could already be a winner!' written on it and you could just chuck it straight in the recycling...
And yet we're still talking about it...
Slashdot | Vista SP1 Is Even Less Compatible
Slashdot | Microsoft Cuts Vista Price In 70 Countries
Slashdot | Did Amazon Induce Vista's Premature Birth?
Slashdot | "Vista Capable" Lawsuit Is Now a Class Action
Slashdot | Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista
Slashdot | Microsoft Had Doubts About the 'Vista Capable' Label
Slashdot | Microsoft Pulls Vista SP1 Update
Slashdot | Hostile ta Vista, Baby
Slashdot | Windows Vista Annoyances
Slashdot | Vista SP1 Update Locks Out Some Users
and that's just the first page of Google results!
In fact, in the past 12 months, there have been 'about 231' slashdot articles with 'Vista' in the title, according to Google. that is vs 'about 339' for linux, and 'about 192' for apple. (also, about 'about 1' for 'a life'
I've had the same thoughts before, that the defendant deserves to get punished, but that the victim doesn't deserve to be rewarded to that degree. My solution would be that the victim gets to nominate a charity and the money gets directed to them.
I wonder how that would change our court-happy society - if the victim knew that even if they won, they'd only more or less get compensated for their losses, they probably wouldn't get the punitive damages themselves.
I think you meant Symbian not Sybian.
I liked the Itchy and Scratchy version better. It makes a better analogy too - when we breathe in the little tiny pieces of satellite, they will dissolve us from the inside out!
You can mock all you like, but how many times has a building that they were occupying had an aircraft crash into it since the implantation?
I would imagine that pirating Vista, or even a service pack for Vista, is more fun that actually using it!
URL?
How much waste cooking oil are you using over there? I'm driving about 600-700km/week lately in a company vehicle, and going through quite a bit of fuel. At home, we (family of 6) use around 1L of cooking oil directly a week, and maybe another 1L indirectly (eg by buying foods that have been cooked in oil). Of that oil, probably only around 75% could actually be re-used. So that leaves a fairly large deficit...
If we could tag posts, yours would be tagged 'youmustbenewhere'.
Me too. It reads exactly like something you'd find in readers digest, which is typical of any article about perpetual motion.
All that article says is that you can make the image clearer. It even says that the zooming in that you see on the crime tv shows is not possible.
If you had a high enough resolution you might be able to apply a convolution matrix to the problem to 're-focus' it, but once you have the image in a digital form with a finite resolution, you can't do that much with it.
And what the crime tv shows do is 'zoom' in, which is different to re-focusing an image. They show an image being zoomed down to about 16x16 pixels and some magic software re-computes it into a high res image. As cool as it looks, it just can't be done. Just think of all the possible images that those 16x16 pixels could represent!
That's the thing about slashdot. I could have pretended to post an excerpt that read "the US acknowledged that at least 2 of the 'broken' cables were caused by failed attempts to splice and intercept communications", and at least 2 people would have believed it!
So what? Would you rather be a suspect because someone said you were there, or because you were there? That would never hold up in court anyway, a cellphone isn't a person. I assumed we were talking now about gps stuff permanent attached to cars.
Surely the price of a speeding ticket, if it came to that, would be worth the value of getting your ill person to hospital on time? Unless you were _really_ speeding, then you're just asking for trouble - no point trying to get to hospital on time if you kill someone on the way!
There was a case in Australia a few years back where a policeman pulled over a father trying to get his son to the hospital. The son was having an asthma attack and was in a pretty bad way, but the cop didn't buy it and mucked around for ages. IIRC he got in a heap of trouble for that. I don't know where you call home but over here in Australia I think we're a pretty laid back sort of people... stuff like that makes the news over here!
We all signed up to (approximately) the same rules when we got our licenses. So play nice.
Fortunately, I won't be the one taking your car away. I don't know what the rules are you where you are, but some states over here (Australia) have implemented anti-'hoon' laws, which go something like if you are caught drag racing or being obviously dangerous on the road (eg not just 20kph over the limit) you'll get your car taken away for a while. Do it again and you'll get it taken away again and this time it will be destroyed. Very satisfying to hear about
Every 1mph you increase your speed is a 1mph increase in the speed difference between you and the trees and light posts you are flying past. Or the car by the side of the road just over the hill on a very narrow shoulder who's just blown a tyre or broken down.
Speaking of blown tyres... there is a fair difference between a blowout at 55mph and 80mph, or even just a brief aquaplane over some water or a slide in some gravel that you didn't notice around a bend.
Have you ever seen how pissed off some cops get when they've just pulled someone over for doing 20mph over the limit? You'd think they'd be happy to be writing another ticket, but they're not. They get tired of getting called out to accidents because another dickhead thought he was perfectly safe doing 80mph in a 55mph zone.
Last of all, why the hurry?
I'm not sure that that is correct. It's probably Newtons fault for not including an exemption in his equations when dealing with negative mass, but I think we can forgive him that.