Re:This is just stupid...
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No, the article is about patents, which are very different from copyright.
Patents require disclosure of an invention (in full detail), have to be applied for, and are time-limited (they last for 17 years after being granted, IIRC). Copyright applies to the expression of ideas (actually, to any tangible expression of anything; writing, sheet music, musical performances, etc.), are automatic and last until 70 years (YMMV) after the author's death (different rules apply to companies, of course).
Most software doesn't have patents applicable to it (about the only examples I can think of are MP3s (Fraunhofer own the compression algorithm) and GIFs (Compuserve, now Unisys, I think, own the compression algorithm), but all software is subject to copyright, unless explicitly made public domain (very different from open source, but you knew that). So doing away with (eg) software patents would have next to no effect on the software industry. Some would say that doing away with copyright would have similar impact, but that's more contentious:)
That's certainly the case in the UK, and the period just keeps on getting longer.
It's not quite a fixed period; copyright lasts until the end of the year containing the nth anniversary of the author's death.
Used to be 30 years (I think), then 50, now 70 (since 1996). The last increase lead to the strange situation of works going out of copyright 50 years after the author's death, and then back in when the period increased to 70 years. For example Virginia Woolf died in 1941, so her works came out of copyright on the first day of 1992 (under the 50 year rule). Then in 1996, they went back under copyright until the first day of 2012.
You pay for commercial software, but not for free software.
That's not necessarily true, if you mean Free (as opposed to free) software. One of the advantages of using open-source software is that you can seek your support elsewhere than from the author. This gives the support vendor more freedom to negotiate the contract (IANAL...) as they have fewer implicit liabilities
Once I become "for hire" I
can't (legally) refuse to accept a passenger without a good reason
IANAL, but I think that you're wrong here. Just because I offer my services for hire doesn't mean that I am compelled to do business with every party that wants to hire me. Perhaps it's different where you live.
The second difference is that when you get software from Microsoft, you can't change it. Any errors *have* to be due to
Microsoft's (in)action
That's the key distinction between free Free software and bought Free software; you're not buying the software, you're buying the support and (potentially) the liability. You don't usually have this potential with non-Free software.
This could be the means of hiding a bonus track. The Stone Roses did this with their last album (Second Coming, in 1997 I think). IIRC, the bonus track was number 90. You could check by listening to all the tracks (in the Stone Roses' case, the blank tracks were all about 3 seconds long), or comparing with another copy of the same CD.
OTOH, I could be spouting misinformed rubbish, like usual:)
Re:The author will be speaking at SpamCon
on
RFC for Spammers
·
· Score: 1
How come I've never heard of this conference?
Perhaps if the organisers do a mass-mail advert they'll get more attendees;)
Funnily enough, there's a story on The Register about just such a beast, with up to 336 Crusoes, which is `practically fanless' (i.e., it has fewer fans). It's designed as a web server, and as such is rackmounted (press release at RLX's site).
I think that if you are truly concerned with keeping your personal information private, don't give it out
That's all very well, unless you want to open a bank account, sign up for an ISP, take out a mortgage, get a job, subscribe to a magazine, make a mail-order/on-line purchase, etc., etc.
If you try to do any of these things, and many others, without giving out personal data, you'll get stuck, particularly if you're trying to get credit. Once these organisations have your data, what's to stop them using it for other purposes, selling it to the various organisations that collect it? In the UK, there's the data protection act, and this legislation is designed to strengthen the privacy that this kind of law provides.
Re:sounds good n ecological to me
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
·
· Score: 1
Problem with that is, we live in a very large country. We can drive for DAYS...
Perhaps you should live closer to your place of work if it takes you that long to get there!
Yes, but posts that are wrong are low quality. They take away from the real issue and either confuse people or make them
have to waste their time responding to the statement
The point of forums like/. is that people respond to messages, correcting mistakes (often with more mistakes, but that's what you get for open debate:] ). Unless moderators are omniscient, the danger is that true statements are marked as false, or vice-versa. Allowing moderators to determine whether or not a statement is true is akin to argument by acclamation (``101/. moderators can't be wrong''). Surely it's better to have reasoned debate than this? How would a simple negative moderation help to change people's minds? It just ends up as ``you're wrong'' ``am not'' etc.
Re:Doesn't anyone know how to use a search engine?
on
Beastie in Bronze
·
· Score: 1
Something that looks
a hundred years old, or so. Victorian
Just to be pointlessly pedantic (after the use of a search engine;), anything Victorian would have to be over a hundred years old. Queen Victoria died on the 22nd of January 1901; 100 years, 1 month and one day ago (at the time of writing).
In a college level CS class YOU WILL FAIL if you don't sufficently comment
your code.
Not necessarily; you may lose marks, but you won't necessarily fail. Comments are a bone of contention among programmers and academics. Some maintain that if a program needs commenting, there's something wrong with it, and that the code should be `self-documenting'. This, IMHO, is nonesense, as there are aspects of software that aren't captured by what it does (e.g., why it does it). OTOH, comments are yet another thing to keep up-to-date, and---unlike the source---they're not mechanically checked.
When I'm debugging someone else's code, the most useful comments are things at the beginning of files (e.g., ``This is an FSM implementation of a lexicial analyser'') and before procedures/functions/subroutines. We've all seen the canonical bad comment (i = i+1;// Add one to i), which documents what is happening on a very low level. What we really need to know is why things are happening, and which domain constructs and concepts are involved.
Once the programmer has enough of an idea of what a particular module is doing, the code should be reasonably obvious. Comments should note things like assumptions (``This subroutine assumes that its argument is a valid list''), things which need doing (``ToDo: check for invalid arguments''), or domain-specific things (``If the wibble isn't gromitted enough, we can't proceed with the gizmo, so we burble instead'').
Source code is for communication between people, after all (otherwise we'd write in machine code), so it should be written with the assumption that both the programmer and others will read it at some point. Today's Astonishing Hack is tomorrow's Nightmarish Muddle. If you think that your code isn't ever going to change, you're wrong; it'll either adapt or die.
Just my 2 dimpled chads,
Stephen
Re:Happy Thanksgiving, You've Been Slashdotted!
on
Spambot Poisoner
·
· Score: 1
...on a day when everyone in the country has the day off...
Which country? I know that 22nd Nov is an unoffical Day of Celebration in the UK (anniversary of Being Rid of That Woman)...
Stephen
Re:The problems are...
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
...data as simple as voting-info should be trivial to recover...
Being a UK citizen, I've watched all the palaver with some amusement (how hard can it be to count accurately?) and dismay (the decision over the person who will become probably the most powerful man in the world has been made by a handful of people who have difficulty filling in a ballot paper). Anyway, wrt to the anonymity issue, when I (or any other UK voter) vote, I go to the polling station, and collect a ballot paper. The clerk crosses me off his/her copy of the list of voters (so I can't vote again), though without much attention to identity checks, and copies the serial number from my ballot paper onto the list of voters, next to my name.
Rumour has it that MI5 used to (during the cold war) check up on those who voted communist, though this is all denied, of course...
I distinctly
remember one article pointing out that if you actually work out the probabilities, you are more likely to be killed by an asteroid than in a
plane crash
How about a car accident? Significantly more likely than either. Not quite as sf, or as cool a way to die. Still hurts, though. Perhaps we should spend the money on the more immediate threat?
The problem with the above is that the people who
receive the equipment are, by definition, those
who can least afford the expertise, time, and money to keep them going when parts fail (as they
do on older machines), especially in the 3rd world, where it's next to impossible to get hold of spare parts. These problems don't, however, apply to the one-year-old machines that get dumped too often.
Reusing hardware---which is a good thing wherever possible---only postpones the problem; eventually all machines will die. ATM, we seem to pay too little attention to our impact on the environment, in lots of things from our petrol usage, to our PC disposal. Certainly we should do as much as possible to reduce the environmental impact of our old hardware, as far as possible.
IIRC, the only legal responsibility of the Queen is to open sessions of pariliment [sic].
Actually, no legislation is passed until it receives Royal Assent. Basically, the monarch has to sign it. In practice, this is rubber-stamping (not, I think, literally), but in principle, one Mrs (HM) Q., of London, could disrupt any laws that she likes. This could, for example, cause problems with abolishing the monarchy; the monarch would have to sign voluntarily.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents require disclosure of an invention (in full detail), have to be applied for, and are time-limited (they last for 17 years after being granted, IIRC). Copyright applies to the expression of ideas (actually, to any tangible expression of anything; writing, sheet music, musical performances, etc.), are automatic and last until 70 years (YMMV) after the author's death (different rules apply to companies, of course).
Most software doesn't have patents applicable to it (about the only examples I can think of are MP3s (Fraunhofer own the compression algorithm) and GIFs (Compuserve, now Unisys, I think, own the compression algorithm), but all software is subject to copyright, unless explicitly made public domain (very different from open source, but you knew that). So doing away with (eg) software patents would have next to no effect on the software industry. Some would say that doing away with copyright would have similar impact, but that's more contentious :)
That's certainly the case in the UK, and the period just keeps on getting longer. It's not quite a fixed period; copyright lasts until the end of the year containing the nth anniversary of the author's death. Used to be 30 years (I think), then 50, now 70 (since 1996). The last increase lead to the strange situation of works going out of copyright 50 years after the author's death, and then back in when the period increased to 70 years. For example Virginia Woolf died in 1941, so her works came out of copyright on the first day of 1992 (under the 50 year rule). Then in 1996, they went back under copyright until the first day of 2012.
Stephen
Not at all: RMS plays the recorder. There's a non-trivial overlap in geekish skills and musical ability.
OTOH, I could be spouting misinformed rubbish, like usual :)
Perhaps if the organisers do a mass-mail advert they'll get more attendees ;)
It's ``He has sandals...''.
HTH!
Funnily enough, there's a story on The Register about just such a beast, with up to 336 Crusoes, which is `practically fanless' (i.e., it has fewer fans). It's designed as a web server, and as such is rackmounted (press release at RLX's site).
If you try to do any of these things, and many others, without giving out personal data, you'll get stuck, particularly if you're trying to get credit. Once these organisations have your data, what's to stop them using it for other purposes, selling it to the various organisations that collect it? In the UK, there's the data protection act, and this legislation is designed to strengthen the privacy that this kind of law provides.
I am,
root
Just my -/-/2d,
Stephen
When I'm debugging someone else's code, the most useful comments are things at the beginning of files (e.g., ``This is an FSM implementation of a lexicial analyser'') and before procedures/functions/subroutines. We've all seen the canonical bad comment (i = i+1; // Add one to i), which documents what is happening on a very low level. What we really need to know is why things are happening, and which domain constructs and concepts are involved.
Once the programmer has enough of an idea of what a particular module is doing, the code should be reasonably obvious. Comments should note things like assumptions (``This subroutine assumes that its argument is a valid list''), things which need doing (``ToDo: check for invalid arguments''), or domain-specific things (``If the wibble isn't gromitted enough, we can't proceed with the gizmo, so we burble instead'').
Source code is for communication between people, after all (otherwise we'd write in machine code), so it should be written with the assumption that both the programmer and others will read it at some point. Today's Astonishing Hack is tomorrow's Nightmarish Muddle. If you think that your code isn't ever going to change, you're wrong; it'll either adapt or die.
Just my 2 dimpled chads,
Stephen
Stephen
Rumour has it that MI5 used to (during the cold war) check up on those who voted communist, though this is all denied, of course...
Just my E 0.02,
Stephen
How about a car accident? Significantly more likely than either. Not quite as sf, or as cool a way to die. Still hurts, though. Perhaps we should spend the money on the more immediate threat?
- Donate it to charity.
- Send it to a third-world nation
The problem with the above is that the people who receive the equipment are, by definition, those who can least afford the expertise, time, and money to keep them going when parts fail (as they do on older machines), especially in the 3rd world, where it's next to impossible to get hold of spare parts. These problems don't, however, apply to the one-year-old machines that get dumped too often.Reusing hardware---which is a good thing wherever possible---only postpones the problem; eventually all machines will die. ATM, we seem to pay too little attention to our impact on the environment, in lots of things from our petrol usage, to our PC disposal. Certainly we should do as much as possible to reduce the environmental impact of our old hardware, as far as possible.
Just my ukp 0.02.
Anyway, it would seem that any race which managed to decipher a CD would have to have a TM by any other name.
... but when `they' find the CD, all the world's COBOL programmers will be too busy earning extortionate rates fixing the Y60K bug...
But I thought that the 2nd amendment right to bear arms is there to allow armed revolt against the government.
\end{naive}
Or have I got hold of the wrong end of the stick?