I'm a US citizen and pay thousands of dollars a year in Federal taxes. Why should I pay *more* to access public court documents from the Federal courts? If the issue is the costs of hosting the documents on servers, this project, by its mere existence, shows that there are people who will gladly shoulder the cost of hosting the documents, so others can access them for free. If the issue is the cost of having people redact documents where necessary, and scan them in (in the situations where the documents aren't electronic to begin with), that should just be part of the costs of court clerks, which our tax dollars pay for *anyhow*.
To really be 'safe', you'd probably want to boot from a known good CD/DVD, install the fixed kernel from the CD/DVD, then reboot from the new kernel on the hard drive, yes? I mean, if your kernel is owned, the rootkit might protect itself somehow from you trying to install a fixed kernel.
You know, this brings up a very interesting point. Someone else in this thread mentioned that the problem was either caused or exacerbated by code which was *optimized out of the kernel by gcc*. Your comment about formal verification (which, I realize is an allusion to the article earlier today or yesterday about that Australian uKernel which was formally verified), makes me wonder - does it *matter* if your C code is formally verified, if your compiler can produce output which doesn't match the specified C-code? I hope those Australians turned off all compiler optimizations. . .
When you buy stock in a company, as a stock owner, you are a partial owner of all land, factories, office buildings (and any other facilities owned by the corporation), furniture, equipment (vehicles, manufacturing machines, etc) that company owns. All that stuff is quite tangible. I can go touch a building, and if I own stock in the company that owns the building, then I (in part), own that building.
As to your main point, virtual property in the 'game world' sense is different. How? You might theoretically 'own' a particular instance of a building in a game, but you most likely do not own the artwork which represents that building (models, textures, shaders, etc), nor the game server in whose memory it resides, nor even the client running on your machine (remember kids, you *license* software copies, you don't *own* software unless you wrote it or payed someone else to right it for you as an employee or contract work-for-hire and have the paperwork to document that fact).
I have a hard time saying you own *anything* if everyone else owns the stuff it's made up of. That's like saying you own your house, but someone else owns the land under your house which you rent, and the materials your house was constructed from (so they could take back the 'materials' any time they wanted).
Do you really own your house if someone else owns the land and materials?
I understand that people, such as the parent, are worried that people might put "too much" stock in a formal verification, but I would still think it's better than *no* verification? Ok, most of the time - if people insist that something has been proven 'correct' when it, in fact, is not correct, that could be a serious problem, because then the problem might not get fixed, but I'd rather be flying in an airplane in which someone at least tried to prove the software correct, than one in which it has not been, in the general case. Sure, they could still both malfunction, but I bet the unproven software would be more *likely* to fail.
"First, there's a point at which that three-year-old brat has asked "Why?" too many times today."
Step 1) Teach your kid how to read and do math.
Step 2) Teach them how to use an encyclopedia, science texts, and other references (dead tree or online, either way) to lookup the answers to their questions.
Parenting isn't necessarily about providing answers to every question your child asks (although some answering is appropriate), but teaching them how to find answers.
No, it'd doesnt - at least, not in all species. In animals, it takes two to reproduce. There are plant species which 'vegetatively' reproduce - that is, part of the plant splits off and becomes a seperate plant (which happens to be a genetic 'clone' of the first plant). IIRC, most single-celled organisms reproduce by simply 'splitting' and cloning themselves.
If you have a species which can reproduce like that, then the species could survive quite well even if each individual only cloned itself once - particularly if it has a sufficiently long lifespan - 1 becomes 2 becomes 3 becomes 4, etc.
There are great reasons to make new games in 'old' franchises, or to re-do earlier games. Graphics is only one of those. There's also issues of the ability to do much more with sound now than some of the early games were able to do with the PC speakers, but even more importantly. . .
* Network/Internet multiplayer (ok, for some games multiplayer would make no sense, but for others, there's great potential
* More memory and faster CPUs means that not only can you update graphics, but you can create universes/worlds populated by more planets, stations, NPCs, ships, etc (how many of those really old games which were supposed to have 'epic' scope, ended up feeling a bit small or empty because of the memory and processing constraints of having 4M or less of memory? There's great opportunity to go back and have much 'bigger' worlds now that most 'gaming' machines have >= 1G of RAM.
"...mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels."
This sentence got me to wondering. . . one of the big problems of thermal electric power plants (coal, natural gas, nuclear), is that we throw away 50-60% of the heat as waste heat into the environment (nearby body of water or the air). Could the waste heat from a coal or nuclear power plant be used to 'bake' the cement? In the case of coal, sure, you're still burning fossil fuels, but those were being burned *anyhow* to generate electricity, so why not put the waste heat to use? You are, *at least*, not burning any *additional* fossil fuels just for the cement, right? In the case of Nuclear, you are using a very low-carbon heat source, and again, doing something useful with the waste heat?
If the rich and stupid want to lower the price of gas for the rest of us by buying expensive plugin hybrids, WHO ARE YOU TO STOP THEM? (Although, higher electric prices could suck. . . but if you heat and cool your house with something like a Geothermal heatpump, and use power-efficient lights and appliances, you might personally come out ahead).
Actually, the electricity comes from plugging into the local grid (which in most cases, currently means burning coal, but also includes hydroelectric, wind, solar, and nuclear; in the future, the renewables could someday come to dominate the energy production mix).
I read somewhere that the method the EPA is currently using to measure mpg for these cars is to see how much fuel is consumed for 51 miles. What happens is the car runs on the batteries for 40 miles, then on gas for 11 miles. So, the average for all 51 miles was 230G, which means the total fuel consumed was approx.2217 Gallons. But,.2217 Gallons / 11 miles approx. = 49.62 MPG (when not running on the batteries).
If the EPA used any value less than or equal to 40 miles, the car would appear to get infinite miles per gallon. If they used 41 miles, then it would appear to get 2034MPG. Basically, by choosing how many miles to use as your 'standard', you can really choose *any* value > 49 for MPG. As the miles increase, the value would asymptotically approach the true MPG when running on fuel.
Assuming a 15 Gallon tank, it holds approximately 541.665 kWH of energy (thermal). Assuming the gas-electric generator is 30% efficient (I don't really know that it is, but I'm guessing it's more efficient than a typical car engine, which Wikipedia lists as 25%), would give us about 162.4995 kWh (electric).
For those curious how I arrived at that number. . .
First, I googled "Joules in a gallon of gas", which took me to this pdf, which gave the Joules of energy in a gallon of gas. Take that number and divide it by 3 600 000 to convert from Joules to kWh. That number yields the thermal energy of the Gasoline, then multiply by the thermal efficiency (which I'm just guessing at, but seems a reasonable/plausible guess) of the generator, and that tells you how many 'gallons of electricity' the car can hold.:-p
Just don't plug it in one or two nights a month and run it on the fuel the next day. That ought to keep the engine lubed and the fuel cycling through. That's a good point, though, in terms of the fact that they should probably tell people that if they buy the car.
It's a simple problem to deal with, as long as people know about the issue and know to not charge the car occasionally so the engine will kick in.
"They have many children for a lot of different reasons but the primary reason is that children past the age of 5 or 6 can work and help the family to survive."
While I suppose this is partly true, to a certain extent, it seems to me, that more kids means more expenses like food, clothing, medicine, education (ok, I realize a lot of these kids might not get much education), etc. It seems to me that if you were just interested in improving your economic situation, you would have no kids, or very few kids, as that means you can spend more of your income on yourself and your spouse. Yes, kids *are* put to work, but I have a hard time believing the people actually choose to have more kids as a means of increasing their income (and, yes, I realize income might not be defined in terms of currency - it might be defined in terms of how many fruits or vegetables are harvested, how many cows milked or other livestock tended for, etc, but it still seems like with fewer mouths to feed, you need less food, less clothes, and so on)?
On top of whatever taxes are part of the phone bill, the way a company gets a license to use RF spectrum in the United States involves spectrum auctions every few years. The last time the spectrum auctions happened, you had cell phone companies paying several billion dollars each for their licenses.
The thing is, companies never 'pay' for anything - they just pass the costs on to the consumer. So, how much of each minute is your share of the 2 or 4 Billion dollars?
I think the whole system is fundamentally broken and does not server U.S. Taxpayers very well, because even though it does raise revenue for the government, it also drives mobile phone bills way up. There's got to be a better, cheaper way to allocate spectrum than a highest-bidder auction.
Could you elaborate further, or provide links to discussions about this? I've heard this, but I've wondered what drives having lots of children among the poor? As a 'best guess', I would assume it's lack of access to birth control methods along with lots of free time with nothing better to do than, errr, 'recreate'?
I don't think any judge will allow the argument that a program is a derivative work of fonts *unless* those fonts are somehow hard-coded into the application. But, modern apps do not hard-code fonts. They use a font library which loads font dynamically at run-time. In that respect, fonts become data, and programs are not derivative works of the data which they use. Otherwise, I could 'hijack' the copyright on Microsoft Office by making a Word Document which I claimed copyright to, and put terms on the copyright of the Word Document which would force Microsoft to pay me a royalty for every copy of Office, because someone, somewhere, might laod my data, so MS Word is a 'derivative' of my work.
I think we can all see what a mess the whole notion of copyright would be in if *data* could impose license terms on *programs*. They are completely seperate works, and must remain that way in order for copyright to have any sane basis.
"You can't link GPL code with non GPL compatible code, library or not."
The person asking the question, as far a I can tell, did NOT ask about linking. He asked about writing one app, which would be GPL, which *would* link the library in question. Then, write another app, which is NOT GPL, which uses something like pipes, networking, or other forms of IPC (interprocess commmunications) to allow the proprietary application to 'communicate' with the GPL 'wrapper' of the application.
This would probably be legal, according to the Free Software Foundation: the GPL FAQ has a section on Plug-Ins which is probably the most responsive/similar to this question. Per the FAQ:
"It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license of the plug-in makes no requirements about the main program."
"What I find personally disturbing about the question itself is that it all but presupposes unethical intentions."
Have you considered that the person asking the question might *be* a free software developer, and is wondering how *effective* the GPLv2 actually is at protecting his work from other 'unethical' people? When thinking about issues like computer security, or the GPL, or many other questions in life, in order to protect yourself, you *must* presuppose that there exist other people with unethical intentions, and then try to figure out how they might exploit your license/code/whatever.
So what will be the energy source you will use for moving this asteroid around? There's no free lunch. Moving an object further 'up' the gravity well it is in always requires energy, and moving something as massive as the earth requires a lot of energy. Moving the earth away from the Sun isn't so different to the classic high-school physics problem of calculating the energy required to lift a mass of m kilograms by h millimeters/meters/inches/feet/miles of height. Sure, because of the issue of orbital mechanics, it's more complicated, but in the end, it still requires energy.
For the method you propose, you would need to slowly apply energy to the asteroid to keep moving it away from the earth, pulling the earth away from the Sun. It might not require a lot of Power (that is, energy per second), but it will have to be maintained for a very, very, very long time to have the desired effect.
Yes, that's a good point that has been well known for a long time. I've been hearing that 2.33 children number for pretty much my entire life (though I'm only 31 so I guess that's not saying too much). I'd say we should aim for 2 children, so that population does shrink, instead of 2.33 children . . .
Unfortunately, some religious traditions have various beliefs that make it so that some people, at least, who follow them, think it's sinful or something to either a) use birth control, or they believe there is an active mandate to have large families.
Still, I wish people would wrap their heads around the idea of adoption. If you just wish to have a large family (or feel 'called' to be a parent to a lot of children, or whatever), it's possible to have the large family, without actually giving birth to 6 or 10 children. Just adopt children who need a family. They need parents, you need children, everyone else needs fewer births for a couple generations, so we can get the global population down to something more sustainable (like 3-4 Billion people).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a US citizen and pay thousands of dollars a year in Federal taxes. Why should I pay *more* to access public court documents from the Federal courts? If the issue is the costs of hosting the documents on servers, this project, by its mere existence, shows that there are people who will gladly shoulder the cost of hosting the documents, so others can access them for free. If the issue is the cost of having people redact documents where necessary, and scan them in (in the situations where the documents aren't electronic to begin with), that should just be part of the costs of court clerks, which our tax dollars pay for *anyhow*.
That's a good point.
To really be 'safe', you'd probably want to boot from a known good CD/DVD, install the fixed kernel from the CD/DVD, then reboot from the new kernel on the hard drive, yes? I mean, if your kernel is owned, the rootkit might protect itself somehow from you trying to install a fixed kernel.
Thanks for the laugh. That is one of my all-time favorite comedy scenes. I laugh every time I think of it.
You know, this brings up a very interesting point. Someone else in this thread mentioned that the problem was either caused or exacerbated by code which was *optimized out of the kernel by gcc*. Your comment about formal verification (which, I realize is an allusion to the article earlier today or yesterday about that Australian uKernel which was formally verified), makes me wonder - does it *matter* if your C code is formally verified, if your compiler can produce output which doesn't match the specified C-code? I hope those Australians turned off all compiler optimizations. . .
Is fixing this problem as simple as recompiling the kernel with a tweaked makefile or something, to tell GCC not to optimize that type of code out?
When you buy stock in a company, as a stock owner, you are a partial owner of all land, factories, office buildings (and any other facilities owned by the corporation), furniture, equipment (vehicles, manufacturing machines, etc) that company owns. All that stuff is quite tangible. I can go touch a building, and if I own stock in the company that owns the building, then I (in part), own that building.
As to your main point, virtual property in the 'game world' sense is different. How? You might theoretically 'own' a particular instance of a building in a game, but you most likely do not own the artwork which represents that building (models, textures, shaders, etc), nor the game server in whose memory it resides, nor even the client running on your machine (remember kids, you *license* software copies, you don't *own* software unless you wrote it or payed someone else to right it for you as an employee or contract work-for-hire and have the paperwork to document that fact).
I have a hard time saying you own *anything* if everyone else owns the stuff it's made up of. That's like saying you own your house, but someone else owns the land under your house which you rent, and the materials your house was constructed from (so they could take back the 'materials' any time they wanted).
Do you really own your house if someone else owns the land and materials?
I understand that people, such as the parent, are worried that people might put "too much" stock in a formal verification, but I would still think it's better than *no* verification? Ok, most of the time - if people insist that something has been proven 'correct' when it, in fact, is not correct, that could be a serious problem, because then the problem might not get fixed, but I'd rather be flying in an airplane in which someone at least tried to prove the software correct, than one in which it has not been, in the general case. Sure, they could still both malfunction, but I bet the unproven software would be more *likely* to fail.
"First, there's a point at which that three-year-old brat has asked "Why?" too many times today."
Step 1) Teach your kid how to read and do math.
Step 2) Teach them how to use an encyclopedia, science texts, and other references (dead tree or online, either way) to lookup the answers to their questions.
Parenting isn't necessarily about providing answers to every question your child asks (although some answering is appropriate), but teaching them how to find answers.
"It takes two to reproduce."
No, it'd doesnt - at least, not in all species. In animals, it takes two to reproduce. There are plant species which 'vegetatively' reproduce - that is, part of the plant splits off and becomes a seperate plant (which happens to be a genetic 'clone' of the first plant). IIRC, most single-celled organisms reproduce by simply 'splitting' and cloning themselves.
If you have a species which can reproduce like that, then the species could survive quite well even if each individual only cloned itself once - particularly if it has a sufficiently long lifespan - 1 becomes 2 becomes 3 becomes 4, etc.
There are great reasons to make new games in 'old' franchises, or to re-do earlier games. Graphics is only one of those. There's also issues of the ability to do much more with sound now than some of the early games were able to do with the PC speakers, but even more importantly. . .
* Network/Internet multiplayer (ok, for some games multiplayer would make no sense, but for others, there's great potential
* More memory and faster CPUs means that not only can you update graphics, but you can create universes/worlds populated by more planets, stations, NPCs, ships, etc (how many of those really old games which were supposed to have 'epic' scope, ended up feeling a bit small or empty because of the memory and processing constraints of having 4M or less of memory? There's great opportunity to go back and have much 'bigger' worlds now that most 'gaming' machines have >= 1G of RAM.
"...mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels."
This sentence got me to wondering. . . one of the big problems of thermal electric power plants (coal, natural gas, nuclear), is that we throw away 50-60% of the heat as waste heat into the environment (nearby body of water or the air). Could the waste heat from a coal or nuclear power plant be used to 'bake' the cement? In the case of coal, sure, you're still burning fossil fuels, but those were being burned *anyhow* to generate electricity, so why not put the waste heat to use? You are, *at least*, not burning any *additional* fossil fuels just for the cement, right? In the case of Nuclear, you are using a very low-carbon heat source, and again, doing something useful with the waste heat?
If the rich and stupid want to lower the price of gas for the rest of us by buying expensive plugin hybrids, WHO ARE YOU TO STOP THEM? (Although, higher electric prices could suck. . . but if you heat and cool your house with something like a Geothermal heatpump, and use power-efficient lights and appliances, you might personally come out ahead).
Actually, the electricity comes from plugging into the local grid (which in most cases, currently means burning coal, but also includes hydroelectric, wind, solar, and nuclear; in the future, the renewables could someday come to dominate the energy production mix).
Ok, one sentence didn't come out quite right. . .
"So, the average for all 51 miles was 230G. . .", should have been:
"So, the average for all 51 miles was 230 MPG. . ."
I read somewhere that the method the EPA is currently using to measure mpg for these cars is to see how much fuel is consumed for 51 miles. What happens is the car runs on the batteries for 40 miles, then on gas for 11 miles. So, the average for all 51 miles was 230G, which means the total fuel consumed was approx .2217 Gallons. But, .2217 Gallons / 11 miles approx. = 49.62 MPG (when not running on the batteries).
If the EPA used any value less than or equal to 40 miles, the car would appear to get infinite miles per gallon. If they used 41 miles, then it would appear to get 2034MPG. Basically, by choosing how many miles to use as your 'standard', you can really choose *any* value > 49 for MPG. As the miles increase, the value would asymptotically approach the true MPG when running on fuel.
Assuming a 15 Gallon tank, it holds approximately 541.665 kWH of energy (thermal). Assuming the gas-electric generator is 30% efficient (I don't really know that it is, but I'm guessing it's more efficient than a typical car engine, which Wikipedia lists as 25%), would give us about 162.4995 kWh (electric).
For those curious how I arrived at that number. . .
First, I googled "Joules in a gallon of gas", which took me to this pdf, which gave the Joules of energy in a gallon of gas. Take that number and divide it by 3 600 000 to convert from Joules to kWh. That number yields the thermal energy of the Gasoline, then multiply by the thermal efficiency (which I'm just guessing at, but seems a reasonable/plausible guess) of the generator, and that tells you how many 'gallons of electricity' the car can hold. :-p
Just don't plug it in one or two nights a month and run it on the fuel the next day. That ought to keep the engine lubed and the fuel cycling through. That's a good point, though, in terms of the fact that they should probably tell people that if they buy the car.
It's a simple problem to deal with, as long as people know about the issue and know to not charge the car occasionally so the engine will kick in.
"They have many children for a lot of different reasons but the primary reason is that children past the age of 5 or 6 can work and help the family to survive."
While I suppose this is partly true, to a certain extent, it seems to me, that more kids means more expenses like food, clothing, medicine, education (ok, I realize a lot of these kids might not get much education), etc. It seems to me that if you were just interested in improving your economic situation, you would have no kids, or very few kids, as that means you can spend more of your income on yourself and your spouse. Yes, kids *are* put to work, but I have a hard time believing the people actually choose to have more kids as a means of increasing their income (and, yes, I realize income might not be defined in terms of currency - it might be defined in terms of how many fruits or vegetables are harvested, how many cows milked or other livestock tended for, etc, but it still seems like with fewer mouths to feed, you need less food, less clothes, and so on)?
On top of whatever taxes are part of the phone bill, the way a company gets a license to use RF spectrum in the United States involves spectrum auctions every few years. The last time the spectrum auctions happened, you had cell phone companies paying several billion dollars each for their licenses.
The thing is, companies never 'pay' for anything - they just pass the costs on to the consumer. So, how much of each minute is your share of the 2 or 4 Billion dollars?
I think the whole system is fundamentally broken and does not server U.S. Taxpayers very well, because even though it does raise revenue for the government, it also drives mobile phone bills way up. There's got to be a better, cheaper way to allocate spectrum than a highest-bidder auction.
Could you elaborate further, or provide links to discussions about this? I've heard this, but I've wondered what drives having lots of children among the poor? As a 'best guess', I would assume it's lack of access to birth control methods along with lots of free time with nothing better to do than, errr, 'recreate'?
I don't think any judge will allow the argument that a program is a derivative work of fonts *unless* those fonts are somehow hard-coded into the application. But, modern apps do not hard-code fonts. They use a font library which loads font dynamically at run-time. In that respect, fonts become data, and programs are not derivative works of the data which they use. Otherwise, I could 'hijack' the copyright on Microsoft Office by making a Word Document which I claimed copyright to, and put terms on the copyright of the Word Document which would force Microsoft to pay me a royalty for every copy of Office, because someone, somewhere, might laod my data, so MS Word is a 'derivative' of my work.
I think we can all see what a mess the whole notion of copyright would be in if *data* could impose license terms on *programs*. They are completely seperate works, and must remain that way in order for copyright to have any sane basis.
"You can't link GPL code with non GPL compatible code, library or not."
The person asking the question, as far a I can tell, did NOT ask about linking. He asked about writing one app, which would be GPL, which *would* link the library in question. Then, write another app, which is NOT GPL, which uses something like pipes, networking, or other forms of IPC (interprocess commmunications) to allow the proprietary application to 'communicate' with the GPL 'wrapper' of the application.
This would probably be legal, according to the Free Software Foundation: the GPL FAQ has a section on Plug-Ins which is probably the most responsive/similar to this question. Per the FAQ:
"It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license of the plug-in makes no requirements about the main program."
"What I find personally disturbing about the question itself is that it all but presupposes unethical intentions."
Have you considered that the person asking the question might *be* a free software developer, and is wondering how *effective* the GPLv2 actually is at protecting his work from other 'unethical' people? When thinking about issues like computer security, or the GPL, or many other questions in life, in order to protect yourself, you *must* presuppose that there exist other people with unethical intentions, and then try to figure out how they might exploit your license/code/whatever.
So what will be the energy source you will use for moving this asteroid around? There's no free lunch. Moving an object further 'up' the gravity well it is in always requires energy, and moving something as massive as the earth requires a lot of energy. Moving the earth away from the Sun isn't so different to the classic high-school physics problem of calculating the energy required to lift a mass of m kilograms by h millimeters/meters/inches/feet/miles of height. Sure, because of the issue of orbital mechanics, it's more complicated, but in the end, it still requires energy.
For the method you propose, you would need to slowly apply energy to the asteroid to keep moving it away from the earth, pulling the earth away from the Sun. It might not require a lot of Power (that is, energy per second), but it will have to be maintained for a very, very, very long time to have the desired effect.
Yes, that's a good point that has been well known for a long time. I've been hearing that 2.33 children number for pretty much my entire life (though I'm only 31 so I guess that's not saying too much). I'd say we should aim for 2 children, so that population does shrink, instead of 2.33 children . . .
Unfortunately, some religious traditions have various beliefs that make it so that some people, at least, who follow them, think it's sinful or something to either a) use birth control, or they believe there is an active mandate to have large families.
Still, I wish people would wrap their heads around the idea of adoption. If you just wish to have a large family (or feel 'called' to be a parent to a lot of children, or whatever), it's possible to have the large family, without actually giving birth to 6 or 10 children. Just adopt children who need a family. They need parents, you need children, everyone else needs fewer births for a couple generations, so we can get the global population down to something more sustainable (like 3-4 Billion people).