Funny but when people violate the GPL then people on Slashdot are gung ho about legal action.
I suggest a take down notice and then contact your publisher and let their legal department go after them. How to fight pirates? And your asking here?
What a terrible terrible analogy. The companies that violate the GPL that get sued are making money and are solid entities with legal statuses. The book pirates are making nothing and they are part of the vaporous cloud of the internet. You would be more effective suing ghosts. They are sharing books that they derive entertainment or information from--not money! I will encourage the EFF to prosecute violators of the GPL. I will encourage O'Reilly to sue these people if they see a loss.
The GPL is a license, violating a license is not the same as violating copyright. You aren't suing over money, you are suing to have the source code released. There are so many differences between your analogy and what's going on here I don't know where to start.
Book pirates claim the partial income of several thousand authors yearly. Once book pirates get underneath the floor boards of your house, nothing gets rid of them. If you have book pirates, you'll notice tiny white dust particles near crevices and creases in your books and book shelves which are actually book pirate eggs. They will hatch and form book pirate larvae that can go weeks without books and still survive which makes extermination difficult. Once infected, a typical book enthusiast has nine to ten days before cells throughout the body are infected with the book pirate virus. You cannot cure book pirates but you can control them. There are means of prevention--a vaccine has been developed for book pirates type one and type two but there are several strains too rare and foreign to address. Book pirate build up occurs around the search engines and torrents of the internet and with them come social stigmas. Regular flossing and lawsuits will also help prevent book pirate and book related decay. If you or someone you know has book pirates or shows book pirate symptoms, get help, get tested and abstain from group readings.
Any thoughts from the Slashdot crowd? The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books. Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell? Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything?
Here's a thought: Have you noticed a recent substantial decrease in sales or income that isn't characteristic across other publishers (maybe based on the recession)?
You seem to already have the negative caged-animal attitude that suing the shit out of everyone is your only option. It's not. Just acknowledging that there are some individuals out there with no respect for your IP is also an option if you're not being sent to the poor house when normally you'd be raking in dough.
My advice would be to try to not sue anyone unless you're absolutely sure no one is buying your book and the social norm is to screw Peter Wayner by pirating it. You have every right to litigate just like I have every right to try to sue my parents for not giving me a better education when they sent me to Catholic school. It's up to you whether or not you sue book pirates.
Why are you taking up the cross and not your publisher, O'Reilly Publishers. Isn't it their job to deal with this and your job to write books? Let them be the big bad evil here.
If you are unsatisfied with the Google hits, maybe you should blog about your books and provide links to them? Or ask your publisher to get an Search Engine Optimizer (SEO)... not sure if those actually work though.
I was diligently working at XYZ Corp a few buildings down when Incident One happened in their lab. At first, I was just sitting in my cubicle when suddenly we felt a severe shuddering of space & time around us. Then a few seconds later everyone heard a loud "Ka-BOOM" and everyone stood up to see what was going on outside. The buildings directly adjacent to the AMD lab had all their windows blown out and every car alarm within a square mile was going off. Some scientists with their hair blown straight back and carbon scoring randomly on their faces and white lab coats were seen to climb out of the rubble of AMD's R&D building. They immediately began dusting themselves off, high-fiving each other and patting each other on the back laughing and ecstatic. Then they headed towards the liqueur store down the street to pick up some champagne. Shortly after it was discovered that 1Ghz is the frequency at which æther vibrates when it is at rest so once you pass it, you leave a wake of æther behind your time cone. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking are due to give a speech at "GPU Ground Zero" this week, I hope to make it.
If I were working marketing for AMD, I would be pointing out how switching from base ten to base eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc provides a theoretically unlimited amount of newsworthy advertisements in broken barriers. "We just need to make it to 2,357,947,691 hertz and we'll be the first to claim we've broken the 1 Ghz (base11) barrier! Where the hell was the report that we broke base9 last year?!"
You know when you try to use Google Reader and Google Mail and Google Anything on your browser with a poor Javascript engine (even the good ones occasionally fail), it sometimes blows up?
Yeah, the Google Web Toolkit (which I believe they are all using for a front end) basically produces code that produces one metric ton of Javascript and HTML that gets dumped on the client's browser. It's not just an application, it's a whole library of Java APIs that produces a ton of Javascript that could become the de facto standard one day. I'm betting it won't but I've asked why more sites aren't using it on Slashdot before.
At least Google eats their own dog food on a large scale.
But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a "read only once" flag?
No. But there inside your home on your desk inside your kindle is a flag so vile, so full of hatred, so very <insert your opposing political party here> that when activated it will only let you read books from Oprah's Book Club.
Everyone's all excited about R2D2 droid but when you build a robotic wookie that challenges you to a game of chess and then rips your arms off when you beat him, you've gone too far!
Hasbro even sells their own functioning R2-D2 droid with real sonar navigation and a 'voice recognition response module.
And at a hieght of only 15", it's as close to the original as you're going to get without needing your very own circus and cabaret performer to power it!
Kenny Baker says, "This tin can is #$^!ing hot in Tunisia... oops, I mean... *boo-boop bee-boo-doop*!"
Saw It in Music! Coming Soon in Games, E-Books
on
Why Bother With DRM?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In an interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia this month, Sony CEO and chairman Howard Stringer revealed an interesting point about open technologies: 'Customers will refuse to accept it unless the technology is open. Youth in particular really dislikes closed technologies, closed systems and the like. I think the failure of AOL LLC of the US is good evidence of this. When the Internet was just beginning to spread, AOL boosted its subscriber base by providing special services only to its customers. After a while, though, customers began rebelling, complaining that they weren't children. Because AOL wanted to keep them locked up in a narrow portion of the immense Internet cosmos, open technology was created. Sony hasn't taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its CONNECT music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads. This approach, however, created a problem: customers couldn't download music from any Websites except those that contracted with Sony. If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US.' He then mentions that Sony has a chance to provide something that Apple can't. Sounds like somebody should inform him of DRM-free iTunes. However when asked about customer confusion over too many open technologies, he claims that the customer will always like choice so the more the better.
Didn't get published so I thought I'd post it here as evidence that even the music distribution companies are saying, "Why bother with DRM?" Not surprising now that Amazon and iTunes are doing it though. I predict everyone will eventually pull their heads out of their asses, it just will take some longer than others.
But even that isn't working much. I mean, I'm working with federal govt. entities, and they are mandating that you can NOT download and use IE8.
I am by no means endorsing or defending IE8 but as someone familiar with corporate America, I can assure you that you are incorrect in your assumptions of motive.
Whenever a new "most significant digit" version is made in a new product, they wait until it's several subdivisions along before jumping to it. Simple reason is that in the 8.01 versions of weblogic or IE there are likely security issues. Which is why some places are still using Weblogic 8.14 or 9.XX instead of jumping to 10.1. They did the same thing with Firefox 2 and 3 where I work. It was "verboten" (god, I hate that crossover word, we have "forbidden" and "prohibited" already in English unless you're making a stupid Nazi reference).
I don't find it interesting, I find it a common precaution. Once it's hardened, they'll be on IE8 just like when they moved from IE6 to 7 (if they even have yet).
Non-technical individuals that have no desire to "upset" the voodoo magic that makes their computer connect to the intarnet.
IE enthusiasts.
People who use websites that only work in IE (like my employer's time card system brought to you by Mrs. Arnold's fifth grade class).
These people will always keep IE's share above some percentage (I'd take a stab of about 66.6%).
Also, and I appreciate Asa's non-profit work but I must question his for-profit source that he cited. Where and how was this data collected? It's a very difficult problem and everyone of these browser-share or operating system-share reports that hits Slashdot are ripped apart by readers as being statistically flawed. No transparency causes me to instantly dismiss these findings.
NoScript's AdBlock-blocking trick was kinda dirty, but I don't see them as being hypocritical for allowing their own ads given the tremendous service(which increases safety while speeding up browsing) they provide for free.
Riiiiight. Because when it's other site's ad income you're negating it's about ideals and the rights of the users. But when it's your site's income it's because your service on your web site is automatically so much more beneficial than Google or Slashdot.
Your position is interesting... you defend NoScript after attacking AdBlock for a lesser crime (merely asking you if you would consider viewing ads after visiting a site many times). What exactly is your angle? I think we may have the first case of Firefox extension fanboism on our hands here, folks.
To help pay for compensation, I shall contact my banking establishment to inquire if there is any possible way to make daily recurring payments of Superman III sized amounts of money to Danowsky's law firm.
So you make my own point. These great novels were never considered "juvenile self-indulgence," as you put it. They were considered obscene, which if you know anything about the history of censorship and obscenity law is hardly the same thing.
I used the original post's quote from AKAImBatman, I didn't imply they were ever actually called that.
I do not mean to say that every video game being frowned upon and banned today would be bad or is a masterpiece in hiding. It is by no means a fair or realistic comparison as novels "grew up" in a different time than video games. What I mean to say is that I'm sure there were trash books back then that were banned and frowned upon and today they are most likely out of print or largely ignored/unkown to the general populace. I am not arguing for RapeLay or Muslim Massacre to appear at Wal-Marts but instead questioning if Six Days in Fallujah could be a Lolita or Ulysses. It's quite possible that if the game is done right, it becomes an epic masterpiece of the realizations of war. Of course it could very well result in me being able to squat over the corpse of a deceased insurgent. I make this argument to say that these games should not be illegal but instead allowed and tollerated.
For that matter, the publisher who released Lolita in the United States anticipated a lot of controversy, but it never actually happened. While Lolita met with controversy in Britain, in the U.S. it became a bestseller almost immediately upon release, having already been recognized as an exemplary work of art by Nabokov's peers.
I do not know the history of Lolita, you are probably right. I'm sure poor taste could make Six Days in Fallujah vastly popular in the United States but banned/admonished in the Middle East. I don't understand what your point is. Censorship here, censorship there, what does it matter? I make my argument that all peoples everywhere should allow controversial games and I stand by it. I think Lolita is a good example of why that is.
Ulysses, on the other hand, was serialized in literary journals over the course of seven years. That's hardly indicative of juvenalia. Joyce had already been recognized as an important writer before he wrote Ulysses.
It was serialized for seven years until one of the serials had a section with a man masturbating. That hit the news and BAM... banned. He was recognized as an important writer by some. But he self-imposed his own exile from Ireland and Europe due to censorship and suppresion of his works.
Compare to videogames.
Fine. Konami has been publishing very fun and respected titles that have earned them a lot of fame and money for many years. Due to pressure from people who think it's not right, they will not be publishing a risque title.
Had James Joyce published Hello Kitty's Trip to Ireland instead of the The Dubliners or Ulysses because he was afraid of criticism and wanted to stay within the norm? Well, two of my favorite works would not be around today.
First published in France by a pornographic press, this 1955 novel explores the mind of a self-loathing and highly intelligent pedophile named Humbert Humbert, who narrates his life and the obsession that consumes it: his lust for "nymphets" like 12-year-old Dolores Haze. French officials banned it for being "obscene," as did England, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa. Today, the term "lolita" has come to imply an oversexed teenage siren, although Nabokov, for his part, never intended to create such associations. In fact, he nearly burned the manuscript in disgust, and fought with his publishers over whether an image of a girl should be included on the book's cover.
Ulysses was banned by the U.S. Customs Court for being "obscene" and pornographic in 1921. It wouldn't be released in the United States until 1933 when that was repealed:
In United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled on December 6, 1933 that the book was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene, a decision that has been called "epoch-making" by Stuart Gilbert. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in 1934.
Wish I could provide better sources for you but they do show up on the list of historically banned books.
Mod him up. He is a perfect example of the general populace that I failed to embody or present fairly in my piece. This is the current view of games.
Does anyone play an "adult" video game to explore the human condition. Heck no. It's all about juvenile self-indulgence. Real adults are far past that stage and have no real desire to subject themselves to unsavory sights and sounds.
And there you have it. That barrier must be overcome for video games to be accepted as a dignified medium worthy of serious topics. It's the perception that must be overcome. I challenge game designers and publishers everywhere to break down this barrier. At one point Lolita and Ulysses were nothing more than "juvenile self-indulgence"...
Much like web services, the importance seems to be in the interfaces. After scanning the developer's guide, the most important aspect of this language seems to be that it's a C# plus Axum libraries that allow you to describe "channels" with input/output keywords. Your Primary Channel is your main program or main 'thread.' If you define an input like:
input int foo;
in your channel class then you can communicate with agent instances that implement that channel quite easily like:
bar_agent::foo <-- 134;
If the data can't be sent over a channel you use (and this word should sound familiar to you web guys) a schema.
From there on out it gets a lot more complicated with state and domain communications/sharing. It looks better thought out than most of Microsoft's libraries I've been forced to use but--as always--new languages need many releases before they are production worthy. A noble effort to simplify concurrency. With some really slick operator coding and overloading, you could probably get a similar thing going in Java or C++.
One last thing I'd like to bitch about is that this download is an MSI. Really? You really need to do that? For the love of christ, I'm a developer. Could you please just give me a standalone zipped up SDK directory that I could add to my path if I want to? I'm not even going to install this because it's going to get all up in my registry n' shit.
First off, might I applaud Davey Winder for his even handed non-biased journalism:
Has Microsoft gone mental?
What is totally mental, and I mean running around the supermarket without your pants on shouting "where is the mustard" mad...
Here is what Mental Microsoft has to say on the matter
I get it, you learned a new word: mental. Please, try to use it in moderation and only when discussing things with your too cool for school third grade friends.
Really, you sound surprised. Didn't they warn us about this anyway? That's why the general populace was not supposed to install this. For savvy users with their old image on a backup drive it's a minor inconvenience.
Can one automagically revert to the legal Windows (if any) they had installed before they installed Windows 7? Of course not, this would make sense. And provide an easy way out of migration. For those who need an ill formed & flawed car analogy: It is like taking a new car for a test drive only to return to the dealership to discover that your old car has been crushed into a cube.
And it was interrupting my raiding schedule. So I hired a hitman to take out my neighbors baby, execution style. Problem fixed itself soon after.
I had him plant some weed on the infant to make it look like a drug deal gone bad but I was still questioned at the trial. Thank god Warcraft can't be considered a motive... yet.
So basically anybody that uses e-mail outside of working hours is an "emailholic"? Doesn't that include pretty much every person who has a computer at home?
The cascading non-homogeneous Poisson process we present
is motivated by two key observations: first, individuals
send e-mail during "sessions" of relatively high activity that
are separated by periods of inactivity during which no emails
are sent; and second, the likelihood of commencing
an active session is modulated by daily and weekly cycles.
For convenience, we define the start and end of a session by
the first and last e-mails sent in that session respectively. We
define an individual as "active" if they are in an e-mail session,
where the time between consecutive e-mails within each
session is modeled as a homogeneous Poisson process with
intra-session rate p_a. Correspondingly, we define an individual
as "passive" if they are between e-mail sessions, where
the time between sessions is modeled as a non-homogeneous
Poisson process with inter-session rate p(t), which explicitly
accounts for daily and weekly cycles of activity.
The paper seems to identify when you're in a session and when you're not and also extrapolates these cycles not only to days but also to times of the week.
While it's not very useful, it my be interesting to behaviorists or some field I know nothing about. It's always dangerous to grab a graph from a paper with no explanation at all of what it is showing.
So there's some more data for you. I added that to this spreadsheet.
So I hope that satisfies everyone who replied to my thread first of all. I hope 5,761,455 primes between one and one hundred million satisfies you.
I used a very simple Non Linear Squares model to solve for a single constant on a log of these values. I think I have a fit. Using Benford's model and the NLS Package in R, I found:
f(x) = 0.020814 * log(161.147689 * ((x+1)/x))
To fit quite nicely, here's the summary:
Formula: y ~ Const1 * log(Const2 * ((x + 1)/x))
Parameters: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) Const1 0.020814 0.001940 10.7292 1.343e-05 *** Const2 161.147689 80.222081 2.0088 0.08452. ---
Residual standard error: 0.0010413 on 7 degrees of freedom
Number of iterations to convergence: 8 Achieved convergence tolerance: 1.8104e-07
Here is the list of frequencies next to what my model produced:
So I read the comments and see that I need to do this in ranges or 1 to 100, 1 to 1000, etc. Which is fine, I've added another R method and would post the code here if it didn't yell at me for junk characters. So here are your Benford lists:
It seems that the curve is flattening out the more data I collect, but the logarithmic curve may be valid. I have the data for 100,000,000 and will add that to the spreadsheet once it completes.
Chrome is still too simplifistic for everyday use.
I would wager that a simplified computing experience is not only what the general public desires but would also be a very refreshing change of pace.
I'm sure that's part of Google's strategy with their general public campaigns. Remember Slashdot is maybe ~1% of web browser users and our tastes are atypical.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny but when people violate the GPL then people on Slashdot are gung ho about legal action. I suggest a take down notice and then contact your publisher and let their legal department go after them. How to fight pirates? And your asking here?
What a terrible terrible analogy. The companies that violate the GPL that get sued are making money and are solid entities with legal statuses. The book pirates are making nothing and they are part of the vaporous cloud of the internet. You would be more effective suing ghosts. They are sharing books that they derive entertainment or information from--not money! I will encourage the EFF to prosecute violators of the GPL. I will encourage O'Reilly to sue these people if they see a loss.
The GPL is a license, violating a license is not the same as violating copyright. You aren't suing over money, you are suing to have the source code released. There are so many differences between your analogy and what's going on here I don't know where to start.
What Can I Do About Book Pirates?
Book pirates claim the partial income of several thousand authors yearly. Once book pirates get underneath the floor boards of your house, nothing gets rid of them. If you have book pirates, you'll notice tiny white dust particles near crevices and creases in your books and book shelves which are actually book pirate eggs. They will hatch and form book pirate larvae that can go weeks without books and still survive which makes extermination difficult. Once infected, a typical book enthusiast has nine to ten days before cells throughout the body are infected with the book pirate virus. You cannot cure book pirates but you can control them. There are means of prevention--a vaccine has been developed for book pirates type one and type two but there are several strains too rare and foreign to address. Book pirate build up occurs around the search engines and torrents of the internet and with them come social stigmas. Regular flossing and lawsuits will also help prevent book pirate and book related decay. If you or someone you know has book pirates or shows book pirate symptoms, get help, get tested and abstain from group readings.
Any thoughts from the Slashdot crowd? The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books. Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell? Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything?
Here's a thought: Have you noticed a recent substantial decrease in sales or income that isn't characteristic across other publishers (maybe based on the recession)?
... not sure if those actually work though.
You seem to already have the negative caged-animal attitude that suing the shit out of everyone is your only option. It's not. Just acknowledging that there are some individuals out there with no respect for your IP is also an option if you're not being sent to the poor house when normally you'd be raking in dough.
My advice would be to try to not sue anyone unless you're absolutely sure no one is buying your book and the social norm is to screw Peter Wayner by pirating it. You have every right to litigate just like I have every right to try to sue my parents for not giving me a better education when they sent me to Catholic school. It's up to you whether or not you sue book pirates.
Why are you taking up the cross and not your publisher, O'Reilly Publishers. Isn't it their job to deal with this and your job to write books? Let them be the big bad evil here.
If you are unsatisfied with the Google hits, maybe you should blog about your books and provide links to them? Or ask your publisher to get an Search Engine Optimizer (SEO)
AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier
I was diligently working at XYZ Corp a few buildings down when Incident One happened in their lab. At first, I was just sitting in my cubicle when suddenly we felt a severe shuddering of space & time around us. Then a few seconds later everyone heard a loud "Ka-BOOM" and everyone stood up to see what was going on outside. The buildings directly adjacent to the AMD lab had all their windows blown out and every car alarm within a square mile was going off. Some scientists with their hair blown straight back and carbon scoring randomly on their faces and white lab coats were seen to climb out of the rubble of AMD's R&D building. They immediately began dusting themselves off, high-fiving each other and patting each other on the back laughing and ecstatic. Then they headed towards the liqueur store down the street to pick up some champagne. Shortly after it was discovered that 1Ghz is the frequency at which æther vibrates when it is at rest so once you pass it, you leave a wake of æther behind your time cone. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking are due to give a speech at "GPU Ground Zero" this week, I hope to make it.
If I were working marketing for AMD, I would be pointing out how switching from base ten to base eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc provides a theoretically unlimited amount of newsworthy advertisements in broken barriers. "We just need to make it to 2,357,947,691 hertz and we'll be the first to claim we've broken the 1 Ghz (base11) barrier! Where the hell was the report that we broke base9 last year?!"
You know when you try to use Google Reader and Google Mail and Google Anything on your browser with a poor Javascript engine (even the good ones occasionally fail), it sometimes blows up?
Yeah, the Google Web Toolkit (which I believe they are all using for a front end) basically produces code that produces one metric ton of Javascript and HTML that gets dumped on the client's browser. It's not just an application, it's a whole library of Java APIs that produces a ton of Javascript that could become the de facto standard one day. I'm betting it won't but I've asked why more sites aren't using it on Slashdot before.
At least Google eats their own dog food on a large scale.
But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a "read only once" flag?
No. But there inside your home on your desk inside your kindle is a flag so vile, so full of hatred, so very <insert your opposing political party here> that when activated it will only let you read books from Oprah's Book Club.
Everyone's all excited about R2D2 droid but when you build a robotic wookie that challenges you to a game of chess and then rips your arms off when you beat him, you've gone too far!
Hasbro even sells their own functioning R2-D2 droid with real sonar navigation and a 'voice recognition response module.
And at a hieght of only 15", it's as close to the original as you're going to get without needing your very own circus and cabaret performer to power it!
... oops, I mean ... *boo-boop bee-boo-doop*!"
Kenny Baker says, "This tin can is #$^!ing hot in Tunisia
Brad Wardell of Stardock and Ron Carmel of 2D Boy
I don't know who that is but a few days ago I submitted a story on an interview with Sony's CEO:
In an interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia this month, Sony CEO and chairman Howard Stringer revealed an interesting point about open technologies: 'Customers will refuse to accept it unless the technology is open. Youth in particular really dislikes closed technologies, closed systems and the like. I think the failure of AOL LLC of the US is good evidence of this. When the Internet was just beginning to spread, AOL boosted its subscriber base by providing special services only to its customers. After a while, though, customers began rebelling, complaining that they weren't children. Because AOL wanted to keep them locked up in a narrow portion of the immense Internet cosmos, open technology was created. Sony hasn't taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its CONNECT music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads. This approach, however, created a problem: customers couldn't download music from any Websites except those that contracted with Sony. If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US.' He then mentions that Sony has a chance to provide something that Apple can't. Sounds like somebody should inform him of DRM-free iTunes. However when asked about customer confusion over too many open technologies, he claims that the customer will always like choice so the more the better.
Didn't get published so I thought I'd post it here as evidence that even the music distribution companies are saying, "Why bother with DRM?" Not surprising now that Amazon and iTunes are doing it though. I predict everyone will eventually pull their heads out of their asses, it just will take some longer than others.
But even that isn't working much. I mean, I'm working with federal govt. entities, and they are mandating that you can NOT download and use IE8.
I am by no means endorsing or defending IE8 but as someone familiar with corporate America, I can assure you that you are incorrect in your assumptions of motive.
Whenever a new "most significant digit" version is made in a new product, they wait until it's several subdivisions along before jumping to it. Simple reason is that in the 8.01 versions of weblogic or IE there are likely security issues. Which is why some places are still using Weblogic 8.14 or 9.XX instead of jumping to 10.1. They did the same thing with Firefox 2 and 3 where I work. It was "verboten" (god, I hate that crossover word, we have "forbidden" and "prohibited" already in English unless you're making a stupid Nazi reference).
I don't find it interesting, I find it a common precaution. Once it's hardened, they'll be on IE8 just like when they moved from IE6 to 7 (if they even have yet).
These people will always keep IE's share above some percentage (I'd take a stab of about 66.6%). Also, and I appreciate Asa's non-profit work but I must question his for-profit source that he cited. Where and how was this data collected? It's a very difficult problem and everyone of these browser-share or operating system-share reports that hits Slashdot are ripped apart by readers as being statistically flawed. No transparency causes me to instantly dismiss these findings.
NoScript's AdBlock-blocking trick was kinda dirty, but I don't see them as being hypocritical for allowing their own ads given the tremendous service(which increases safety while speeding up browsing) they provide for free.
Riiiiight. Because when it's other site's ad income you're negating it's about ideals and the rights of the users. But when it's your site's income it's because your service on your web site is automatically so much more beneficial than Google or Slashdot.
... you defend NoScript after attacking AdBlock for a lesser crime (merely asking you if you would consider viewing ads after visiting a site many times). What exactly is your angle? I think we may have the first case of Firefox extension fanboism on our hands here, folks.
Your position is interesting
To help pay for compensation, I shall contact my banking establishment to inquire if there is any possible way to make daily recurring payments of Superman III sized amounts of money to Danowsky's law firm.
So you make my own point. These great novels were never considered "juvenile self-indulgence," as you put it. They were considered obscene, which if you know anything about the history of censorship and obscenity law is hardly the same thing.
I used the original post's quote from AKAImBatman, I didn't imply they were ever actually called that.
I do not mean to say that every video game being frowned upon and banned today would be bad or is a masterpiece in hiding. It is by no means a fair or realistic comparison as novels "grew up" in a different time than video games. What I mean to say is that I'm sure there were trash books back then that were banned and frowned upon and today they are most likely out of print or largely ignored/unkown to the general populace. I am not arguing for RapeLay or Muslim Massacre to appear at Wal-Marts but instead questioning if Six Days in Fallujah could be a Lolita or Ulysses. It's quite possible that if the game is done right, it becomes an epic masterpiece of the realizations of war. Of course it could very well result in me being able to squat over the corpse of a deceased insurgent. I make this argument to say that these games should not be illegal but instead allowed and tollerated.
For that matter, the publisher who released Lolita in the United States anticipated a lot of controversy, but it never actually happened. While Lolita met with controversy in Britain, in the U.S. it became a bestseller almost immediately upon release, having already been recognized as an exemplary work of art by Nabokov's peers.
I do not know the history of Lolita, you are probably right. I'm sure poor taste could make Six Days in Fallujah vastly popular in the United States but banned/admonished in the Middle East. I don't understand what your point is. Censorship here, censorship there, what does it matter? I make my argument that all peoples everywhere should allow controversial games and I stand by it. I think Lolita is a good example of why that is.
Ulysses, on the other hand, was serialized in literary journals over the course of seven years. That's hardly indicative of juvenalia. Joyce had already been recognized as an important writer before he wrote Ulysses.
It was serialized for seven years until one of the serials had a section with a man masturbating. That hit the news and BAM ... banned. He was recognized as an important writer by some. But he self-imposed his own exile from Ireland and Europe due to censorship and suppresion of his works.
Compare to videogames.
Fine. Konami has been publishing very fun and respected titles that have earned them a lot of fame and money for many years. Due to pressure from people who think it's not right, they will not be publishing a risque title.
Had James Joyce published Hello Kitty's Trip to Ireland instead of the The Dubliners or Ulysses because he was afraid of criticism and wanted to stay within the norm? Well, two of my favorite works would not be around today.
At one point Lolita and Ulysses were nothing more than "juvenile self-indulgence" ...
Um, since you bothered to link to Wikipedia, need I say more than "citation needed"?
On Lolita from Time Magazine:
First published in France by a pornographic press, this 1955 novel explores the mind of a self-loathing and highly intelligent pedophile named Humbert Humbert, who narrates his life and the obsession that consumes it: his lust for "nymphets" like 12-year-old Dolores Haze. French officials banned it for being "obscene," as did England, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa. Today, the term "lolita" has come to imply an oversexed teenage siren, although Nabokov, for his part, never intended to create such associations. In fact, he nearly burned the manuscript in disgust, and fought with his publishers over whether an image of a girl should be included on the book's cover.
Ulysses was banned by the U.S. Customs Court for being "obscene" and pornographic in 1921. It wouldn't be released in the United States until 1933 when that was repealed:
In United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled on December 6, 1933 that the book was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene, a decision that has been called "epoch-making" by Stuart Gilbert. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in 1934.
Wish I could provide better sources for you but they do show up on the list of historically banned books.
Ok mods. I've said my piece. Backlash time.
Mod him up. He is a perfect example of the general populace that I failed to embody or present fairly in my piece. This is the current view of games.
Does anyone play an "adult" video game to explore the human condition. Heck no. It's all about juvenile self-indulgence. Real adults are far past that stage and have no real desire to subject themselves to unsavory sights and sounds.
And there you have it. That barrier must be overcome for video games to be accepted as a dignified medium worthy of serious topics. It's the perception that must be overcome. I challenge game designers and publishers everywhere to break down this barrier. At one point Lolita and Ulysses were nothing more than "juvenile self-indulgence" ...
in your channel class then you can communicate with agent instances that implement that channel quite easily like:
If the data can't be sent over a channel you use (and this word should sound familiar to you web guys) a schema.
From there on out it gets a lot more complicated with state and domain communications/sharing. It looks better thought out than most of Microsoft's libraries I've been forced to use but--as always--new languages need many releases before they are production worthy. A noble effort to simplify concurrency. With some really slick operator coding and overloading, you could probably get a similar thing going in Java or C++.
One last thing I'd like to bitch about is that this download is an MSI. Really? You really need to do that? For the love of christ, I'm a developer. Could you please just give me a standalone zipped up SDK directory that I could add to my path if I want to? I'm not even going to install this because it's going to get all up in my registry n' shit.
Has Microsoft gone mental?
What is totally mental, and I mean running around the supermarket without your pants on shouting "where is the mustard" mad ...
Here is what Mental Microsoft has to say on the matter
I get it, you learned a new word: mental. Please, try to use it in moderation and only when discussing things with your too cool for school third grade friends.
Really, you sound surprised. Didn't they warn us about this anyway? That's why the general populace was not supposed to install this. For savvy users with their old image on a backup drive it's a minor inconvenience.
Can one automagically revert to the legal Windows (if any) they had installed before they installed Windows 7? Of course not, this would make sense. And provide an easy way out of migration. For those who need an ill formed & flawed car analogy: It is like taking a new car for a test drive only to return to the dealership to discover that your old car has been crushed into a cube.
And it was interrupting my raiding schedule. So I hired a hitman to take out my neighbors baby, execution style. Problem fixed itself soon after.
... yet.
I had him plant some weed on the infant to make it look like a drug deal gone bad but I was still questioned at the trial. Thank god Warcraft can't be considered a motive
So basically anybody that uses e-mail outside of working hours is an "emailholic"? Doesn't that include pretty much every person who has a computer at home?
Well, from the PDF linked on arxiv:
The cascading non-homogeneous Poisson process we present is motivated by two key observations: first, individuals send e-mail during "sessions" of relatively high activity that are separated by periods of inactivity during which no emails are sent; and second, the likelihood of commencing an active session is modulated by daily and weekly cycles. For convenience, we define the start and end of a session by the first and last e-mails sent in that session respectively. We define an individual as "active" if they are in an e-mail session, where the time between consecutive e-mails within each session is modeled as a homogeneous Poisson process with intra-session rate p_a. Correspondingly, we define an individual as "passive" if they are between e-mail sessions, where the time between sessions is modeled as a non-homogeneous Poisson process with inter-session rate p(t), which explicitly accounts for daily and weekly cycles of activity.
The paper seems to identify when you're in a session and when you're not and also extrapolates these cycles not only to days but also to times of the week.
While it's not very useful, it my be interesting to behaviorists or some field I know nothing about. It's always dangerous to grab a graph from a paper with no explanation at all of what it is showing.
Counted Occurances:
686048, 664277, 651085, 641594, 633932, 628206, 622882, 618610, 614821
Frequencies:
0.119, 0.115, 0.113, 0.111, 0.110, 0.109, 0.108, 0.107, 0.107
So there's some more data for you. I added that to this spreadsheet.
So I hope that satisfies everyone who replied to my thread first of all. I hope 5,761,455 primes between one and one hundred million satisfies you.
I used a very simple Non Linear Squares model to solve for a single constant on a log of these values. I think I have a fit. Using Benford's model and the NLS Package in R, I found:
f(x) = 0.020814 * log(161.147689 * ((x+1)/x))
To fit quite nicely, here's the summary:
Here is the list of frequencies next to what my model produced:
I would wager that they are correct. Neat discovery!
So I read the comments and see that I need to do this in ranges or 1 to 100, 1 to 1000, etc. Which is fine, I've added another R method and would post the code here if it didn't yell at me for junk characters. So here are your Benford lists:
All Primes 1-100
Counted Occurances:
4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 4, 2, 1
Frequencies:
0.160, 0.120, 0.120, 0.120, 0.120, 0.080, 0.160, 0.080, 0.040
All Primes 1-1,000
Counted Occurances:
25, 19, 19, 20, 17, 18, 18, 17, 15
Frequencies:
0.149, 0.113, 0.113, 0.119, 0.101, 0.107, 0.107, 0.101, 0.089
All Primes 1-10,000
Counted Occurances:
160, 146, 139, 139, 131, 135, 125, 127, 127
Frequencies:
0.130, 0.119, 0.113, 0.113, 0.107, 0.110, 0.102, 0.103, 0.103
All Primes 1-100,000
Counted Occurances:
1193, 1129, 1097, 1069, 1055, 1013, 1027, 1003, 1006
Frequencies:
0.124, 0.118, 0.114, 0.111, 0.110, 0.106, 0.107, 0.105, 0.105
All Primes 1-1,000,000
Counted Occurances:
9585, 9142, 8960, 8747, 8615, 8458, 8435, 8326, 8230
Frequencies:
0.122, 0.116, 0.114, 0.111, 0.110, 0.108, 0.107, 0.106, 0.105
All Primes 1-10,000,000
Counted Occurances:
80020, 77025, 75290, 74114, 72951, 72257, 71564, 71038, 70320
Frequencies:
0.120, 0.116, 0.113, 0.112, 0.110, 0.109, 0.108, 0.107, 0.106
This is the raw data so to turn that into something visual, I dumped it into a Google spreadsheet and made it public (note the scale on the y axis). Enjoy!
It seems that the curve is flattening out the more data I collect, but the logarithmic curve may be valid. I have the data for 100,000,000 and will add that to the spreadsheet once it completes.
Which puts the probabilities at:
My computer is currently crunching the first fifty million primes and I will post those as a reply to this post later today when it is done.
These ratios on numbers 2-9 seem far too close in range for this to be a true log scale. Hopefully with more data it will be more logarithmic.
Chrome is still too simplifistic for everyday use.
I would wager that a simplified computing experience is not only what the general public desires but would also be a very refreshing change of pace.
I'm sure that's part of Google's strategy with their general public campaigns. Remember Slashdot is maybe ~1% of web browser users and our tastes are atypical.
So they can halve their user-share.