it's even easier than that. the same captcha gets presented randomly to two people (quasi-)simultaneously. Unless both parties type the same word, neither is verified. This gives an added incentive to people to type what it really says. Of course, it leaves open some room for the sub-class of assholes who will gleefully spend hours typing the wrong answer to captchas, just to fsck with the other guy. That's why you always have to give a failed verification a couple of chances. Hey, sometimes i mistype my password a few times, too. It's no big deal.
Only of items purchased wholesale and sold as new. This wouldn't affect the sale of used goods.
I see the point you make, but here's what worries me, posed as a personal example. I recently bought a bunch of stuff in an auction from a company that went belly-up. In the sale, I got a LOT of stuff (pun intended;) that was brand-new-never-been-opened that originated with 3rd-party suppliers. Would resale of this apply under such a ruling? I am going to be selling this stuff on eBay as BRAND NEW (because it is).
In the end, it doesn't affect me directly as I don't live in the USA, but preventing its sale on eBay would probably affect me in some way.
It won't happen that way until there is a coherent established framework for functional testing of the "building block" code. It is GREAT to reuse code, and I've worked on a few projects that became GPL due to my incorporation of GPL code. However, most professional projects I've worked on require more on the reliablity front so no time (time == $$money$$) is lost. Any reused/mined code incorporated into these projects has had to be so rigorously inspected and tested for function that when combined with the time spent on banging together glue code, we may as well have started from scratch for those code chunks.
The exception to this is tiny code chunks that either have a simple testable API (eg. no functions that return values variable with time), libraries/code that have been so widely used that you can "mostly" assume that it's valid (eg. zlib), or occasionaly some banged together prototype "proof of concept" app.
Until some standard framework is created that the code can be tested for validity by those incorporating the code, it likely won't happen fast (other than for the exceptions listed above).
For the record, I don't know what that standard framework may be. Personally, i'm in the habit of whenever i write a class, i include a static test function in the class that can be called to put it through its paces and check for validity on all functions and expected data alignments. (eg. on some arm processors i've worked on, a struct is packed based on a 4-byte boundary, and sometimes extra "surprise" filler bytes are inserted. Lots of fun to track those down when you're not expecting them.)
A friend wrote this on the same topic. I call this limit the "Burton Radius", after my pal, Burton.
30 seconds spent thInking of a good definition for the lower limit of whAt can define a planet leads Me to tHink "planet" should be defIned as "any celestial body that orbits a star, off of which a typical human could not jump themselves into orbit". if you can Go jump into orbit, it's not a planet. if you can't, it is. i define an orbit as moving 2*pi or greater rotations (in radians) around another mass to which you are gravitationally bound without touching the ground.
GPL is not being compared to "plain old copyright law" in that example; it is being compared to the absence of any legal restraint.
Well why don't we compare apples to little green men from Alpha Centauri, then?
Using the GPL for comparison in the context of the absense of any other legal restraint is pointless - the GPL exists only within the context of copyright law's legal restraint. To use it in a comparison outside that context (copyright law) is moot at best and deceptive at worst.
In the given example, it is copyright law that is the restriction and the GPL releases restrictions placed on us by copyright law. The GPL just doesn't release you from all existing antecedent restrictions.
I used to grade student's code as a TA at my university, and I'll tell you what is more annoying than NO comments, this: printf("Encrypt message...");/* print "Encrypt message..." to the console */
The student must have had his Relevance parameter closer to SCO and the Verbosity set closer to IBM on his//her version of commentator
Being lazy and smart does not necessarily equate to being stupid
Ye speak the truth. It has long been known that if you want to find the most efficient way to do something, give it to a lazy (and ostensibly smart) person to do.;-)
Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information
Well, if it can be write-only, i already have a petabyte storage device on my PC. I call it "Cam's Superfast and Most Excellent Petabyte Write-Only Storage Device", but most of you just call it/dev/null.;-)
I heartily hope that what Sun (and IBM) are doing with renting grid computing time takes off. I believe it to be a good idea and a useful service. However, if somebody tries to patent it (or a business model), please refer to the public-released idea at http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Distributed_20Compu ting_20Business_20Model#1057251600 to see if this idea from 2002 can be used to invalidate the patent.
Funny...now you can buy "grid computing time" on a network of computers. Back in the day, you could buy "computing time" on a powerful mainframe. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
While I don't know about pi, an irrational number does not have to contain every combination of digits. For example, take this irrational number: 3.131131113111131111131111113111111311111113...
Hmmm....it doesn't contain them in base 10. Look at it again in base 13. Nobody makes jokes in base 13.
Based on the assumption that the information in the article at (http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/013115.shtml) is true, I think this kind of thing happening in the world should be a kick in the pants to democracies around the world; "Yes, look, it really does happen - some governments attempt to suppress the **FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION** between citizens and the rest of the world." Seeing this should make us ever vigilant with our own governments to make sure we never give them the power to censor us!
You just buy a 2GB sandisk CF card and mark it as a 64MB card [...snip...] There are more than a few identical weight products that would allow you to get around that
Be careful. In the example of the 2GB/64MB switch, how did they implement the difference? Did they shrink the die, add more cores, add more chips? The supermarket scale that measured my big bag of shaved lunchmeat is accurate to at least one gram. You may find that the 2GB/64MB difference is detectable by the checkout scale.
In fact, contract or no contract, I've often found it better NOT to do business with friends. I know of too many cases where it has ruined relationships that I assure you were originally rock-solid.
My $0.016 (it's canadian money): One of my old great friends from high school asked me to get a ticket for him too for a concert. I was a poor student, but i figured it was no problem to drop $40 for his ticket knowing he'd pay me back as soon as he could. But instead, even after i told him multiple times that i needed the cash i would still see him going out drinking or coming home with a 2-4 of beer(which cost $20-something each) for MONTHS. He had enough money to spend lots of money on booze, movies, etc, but couldn't bother to pay me back. He needed the money for beer, but i needed the money for food. After not really bothing to speak to him anymore, he paid me back years later and apologized for taking so long to pay me back. It's now years later again. We still see each other at some function where an old high school buddy has a party or something. He is a good man in many ways, but I still feel saddened that our friendship became damaged by something uncovered by a pawltry $40. I didn't even really care about the money as much as i cared about his lack of concern for my welfare when i loaned my resources to him..
On a happier note, once when i first lived in Hawai'i, my neighbor would loan me his bike to get groceries (neither of us had a car) or he took me fishing down to the lagoon (on the apt complex propery) with him, and he showed me where 7-11 was on the first night i showed up (i needed to buy toilet paper, etc. Lesson #1: When you move to a new town, pack toilet paper in your carrying luggage for the trip). Every occasion he and i were out together, he moaned about not having any money to the point where it was obvious that he was fishing for me to say "i could lend you some, how much do you need?", but i wanted him to actually ask me for it rather than try and get me to offer it. That way, it was much clearer that i wanted it back. A non-working period before i moved there had cleaned out my account and i was living at the edge of my money again, so i couldn't afford to give him the money. After about 2 weeks, he came to me with a story about his girlfriend needed some medication and he had to secretly ask me for $20 to buy it for her. He said I couldn't say anything to her because he didn't want her to know he was borrowing money for her medicine, because then she'd refuse to let him buy it and she'd just be sick. "Wow," i thought, "for $20 I'd love to see if this story is actually true." I had just been paid. So, I said "sure, no problem man. I'll come with you to the phramacy too, `cause i have to go pick up something there, myself." His face showed that he didn't think this was the greatest idea, but he was mainly focussed on that i had agreed to give him the $20 when we got to the store with the pharmacy (it was a local supermarket-type). We got to the supermarket, i gave him the $20 as we were walking in, and then we parted ways. Thirty seconds later i saw him going through the checkout buying cigarettes for $13. I stopped and looked at him quizzically while thinking "You ask me for $20 for medicine for your girlfriend, and then you spend $13 of it on smokes?" When I hadn't said anything, he angrily blurted out "Well, i need some fucking smokes too, don't I?". After that he avoided me and I never saw that guy close up again before i moved away almost a year later. Lesson #2: If you loan a man money and you never see him again, that's money well spent.
With the 5 1/4" and 8" (was it 8"? they were before my time for the most part) floppy drives (the soft cased ones) were sold as one-sided or two-sided. The one-sided ones were the same as the two-sided, except their batch quality wasn't considered good enough. They sold the two-sided rejects as one-sided disks, which was enforced by a single notch on the side of the disk. Those sold as double-sided (abbreviated DS) had to notches, so you could put it in upside down for a doubled diskette size in kB. (IIRC, the 5 1/4" diskettes would go from 760kB to 1.2MB on the double density ones. (abbr. DS-DD)) By making a notch on the *other* side of the one-sided disk, you were able to use the other alleged-lower-quality disk surface. Most of the time they were fine, but if they weren't then you still had what you paid for. You could even run chkdsk or something like that and lock out the bad sectors, so even if it was damaged, you could probably salvage something. Thus, increasing your disk space in a time when a 100kB file was a big deal.
keywords: old legacy diskettes; cost of disk space; optimization of disk space; stories of technology; History, Technology; Karma Whoring
I have a lot of audio files from my personal digital recorder that i need converted to greppable textfiles. I have absolutely no requirement for realtime function - i'd be very happy to load up a directory of files and leave my computer to think about it for hours/days/weeks for an optimal recognition/transcription.
Has anybody got a tool for something like that? I've been searching for months and found nothing suitable.
Luna, at 2160 miles diameter, often passes by the Earth at 238 855 miles! This is far scarier than some puny 3 mile asteroid!! You can even SEE this monstrous danger with the naked eye!!! Run for your lives! Let hedonism reign!
Just as an example off the top of my head, it's common to write
if (condition = immediate)...
On a similiar note, things like
if (pointer = NULL)... always used to find its way into my code by lazy fingers not typing "==". A friend showed me a trick to have the compiler complain and catch this bug. Simply put the constant first, i.e.:
if (NULL = pointer)... which will cause the compiler to barf, so you can correct it with minimal frustration. I cannot believe how much time this simple trick has saved me!
The g64 is going to be commodore's 64GBytes of memory computer to commemorate technology making it possible for them to make a home system that has 2^20 (a.k.a. a binary million) times the memory capacity as the c64 which was a huge wow for its time. A million times! You heard it here, first!
Slashdot Mirror
it's even easier than that. the same captcha gets presented randomly to two people (quasi-)simultaneously. Unless both parties type the same word, neither is verified. This gives an added incentive to people to type what it really says. Of course, it leaves open some room for the sub-class of assholes who will gleefully spend hours typing the wrong answer to captchas, just to fsck with the other guy. That's why you always have to give a failed verification a couple of chances. Hey, sometimes i mistype my password a few times, too. It's no big deal.
Only of items purchased wholesale and sold as new. This wouldn't affect the sale of used goods.
;) that was brand-new-never-been-opened that originated with 3rd-party suppliers. Would resale of this apply under such a ruling? I am going to be selling this stuff on eBay as BRAND NEW (because it is).
I see the point you make, but here's what worries me, posed as a personal example. I recently bought a bunch of stuff in an auction from a company that went belly-up. In the sale, I got a LOT of stuff (pun intended
In the end, it doesn't affect me directly as I don't live in the USA, but preventing its sale on eBay would probably affect me in some way.
If this preposterous case turns out with manufacturer set floor prices, would this also end auctions across the USA, including eBay?!
Burton MacKenZie has a speculative analysis on google's ascendancy to power as well.
It won't happen that way until there is a coherent established framework for functional testing of the "building block" code. It is GREAT to reuse code, and I've worked on a few projects that became GPL due to my incorporation of GPL code. However, most professional projects I've worked on require more on the reliablity front so no time (time == $$money$$) is lost. Any reused/mined code incorporated into these projects has had to be so rigorously inspected and tested for function that when combined with the time spent on banging together glue code, we may as well have started from scratch for those code chunks.
The exception to this is tiny code chunks that either have a simple testable API (eg. no functions that return values variable with time), libraries/code that have been so widely used that you can "mostly" assume that it's valid (eg. zlib), or occasionaly some banged together prototype "proof of concept" app.
Until some standard framework is created that the code can be tested for validity by those incorporating the code, it likely won't happen fast (other than for the exceptions listed above).
For the record, I don't know what that standard framework may be. Personally, i'm in the habit of whenever i write a class, i include a static test function in the class that can be called to put it through its paces and check for validity on all functions and expected data alignments. (eg. on some arm processors i've worked on, a struct is packed based on a 4-byte boundary, and sometimes extra "surprise" filler bytes are inserted. Lots of fun to track those down when you're not expecting them.)
A friend wrote this on the same topic. I call this limit the "Burton Radius", after my pal, Burton.
- size-limit-of-planet-my-two.html
30 seconds spent thInking of a good definition for the lower limit of whAt can define a planet leads Me to tHink "planet" should be defIned as "any celestial body that orbits a star, off of which a typical human could not jump themselves into orbit". if you can Go jump into orbit, it's not a planet. if you can't, it is. i define an orbit as moving 2*pi or greater rotations (in radians) around another mass to which you are gravitationally bound without touching the ground.
Just so.
taken from:
http://burtonmackenzie.blogspot.com/2006/06/lower
GPL is not being compared to "plain old copyright law" in that example; it is being compared to the absence of any legal restraint.
Well why don't we compare apples to little green men from Alpha Centauri, then?
Using the GPL for comparison in the context of the absense of any other legal restraint is pointless - the GPL exists only within the context of copyright law's legal restraint. To use it in a comparison outside that context (copyright law) is moot at best and deceptive at worst.
In the given example, it is copyright law that is the restriction and the GPL releases restrictions placed on us by copyright law. The GPL just doesn't release you from all existing antecedent restrictions.
I used to grade student's code as a TA at my university, and I'll tell you what is more annoying than NO comments, this: /* print "Encrypt message..." to the console */
printf("Encrypt message...");
The student must have had his Relevance parameter closer to SCO and the Verbosity set closer to IBM on his//her version of
commentator
Being lazy and smart does not necessarily equate to being stupid
;-)
Ye speak the truth. It has long been known that if you want to find the most efficient way to do something, give it to a lazy (and ostensibly smart) person to do.
>>"not unacceptable"
>why the fuck didn't you just say acceptable?
"not full" != empty
the world isn't binary.
that's why.
are fake nerds. What is the word for that?
nauganerds
Well, if it can be write-only, i already have a petabyte storage device on my PC. I call it "Cam's Superfast and Most Excellent Petabyte Write-Only Storage Device", but most of you just call it
I'd like to see this run as a distributed computing project, as a sort of race to achieve measurable consciousnessness [sic] among the organisms.
How will you measure consciousness?
I heartily hope that what Sun (and IBM) are doing with renting grid computing time takes off. I believe it to be a good idea and a useful service. However, if somebody tries to patent it (or a business model), please refer to the public-released idea at http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Distributed_20Compu ting_20Business_20Model#1057251600 to see if this idea from 2002 can be used to invalidate the patent.
Funny...now you can buy "grid computing time" on a network of computers. Back in the day, you could buy "computing time" on a powerful mainframe. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
While I don't know about pi, an irrational number does not have to contain every combination of digits. For example, take this irrational number: 3.131131113111131111131111113111111311111113...
Hmmm....it doesn't contain them in base 10. Look at it again in base 13. Nobody makes jokes in base 13.
Oh sorry, wrong article.
ps. Also see Voltaire: "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
Based on the assumption that the information in the article at (http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/013115.shtml) is true, I think this kind of thing happening in the world should be a kick in the pants to democracies around the world; "Yes, look, it really does happen - some governments attempt to suppress the **FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION** between citizens and the rest of the world." Seeing this should make us ever vigilant with our own governments to make sure we never give them the power to censor us!
Canada recently concluded a supreme court case where the Little Sisters Bookstore fought the good fight and beat back the darkness http://www.littlesistersbookstore.com/court.asp
Americans, watch out for that Patriot Act! http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html
Remember Jefferson: "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!"
No, really. It is!
You just buy a 2GB sandisk CF card and mark it as a 64MB card [...snip...] There are more than a few identical weight products that would allow you to get around that
Be careful. In the example of the 2GB/64MB switch, how did they implement the difference? Did they shrink the die, add more cores, add more chips? The supermarket scale that measured my big bag of shaved lunchmeat is accurate to at least one gram. You may find that the 2GB/64MB difference is detectable by the checkout scale.
Why do you need to know where it's [the $20] going?
Read the post again. At no point did i say i needed to know where it was going.
My $0.016 (it's canadian money):
One of my old great friends from high school asked me to get a ticket for him too for a concert. I was a poor student, but i figured it was no problem to drop $40 for his ticket knowing he'd pay me back as soon as he could. But instead, even after i told him multiple times that i needed the cash i would still see him going out drinking or coming home with a 2-4 of beer(which cost $20-something each) for MONTHS. He had enough money to spend lots of money on booze, movies, etc, but couldn't bother to pay me back. He needed the money for beer, but i needed the money for food. After not really bothing to speak to him anymore, he paid me back years later and apologized for taking so long to pay me back. It's now years later again. We still see each other at some function where an old high school buddy has a party or something. He is a good man in many ways, but I still feel saddened that our friendship became damaged by something uncovered by a pawltry $40. I didn't even really care about the money as much as i cared about his lack of concern for my welfare when i loaned my resources to him..
On a happier note, once when i first lived in Hawai'i, my neighbor would loan me his bike to get groceries (neither of us had a car) or he took me fishing down to the lagoon (on the apt complex propery) with him, and he showed me where 7-11 was on the first night i showed up (i needed to buy toilet paper, etc. Lesson #1: When you move to a new town, pack toilet paper in your carrying luggage for the trip). Every occasion he and i were out together, he moaned about not having any money to the point where it was obvious that he was fishing for me to say "i could lend you some, how much do you need?", but i wanted him to actually ask me for it rather than try and get me to offer it. That way, it was much clearer that i wanted it back. A non-working period before i moved there had cleaned out my account and i was living at the edge of my money again, so i couldn't afford to give him the money. After about 2 weeks, he came to me with a story about his girlfriend needed some medication and he had to secretly ask me for $20 to buy it for her. He said I couldn't say anything to her because he didn't want her to know he was borrowing money for her medicine, because then she'd refuse to let him buy it and she'd just be sick. "Wow," i thought, "for $20 I'd love to see if this story is actually true." I had just been paid. So, I said "sure, no problem man. I'll come with you to the phramacy too, `cause i have to go pick up something there, myself." His face showed that he didn't think this was the greatest idea, but he was mainly focussed on that i had agreed to give him the $20 when we got to the store with the pharmacy (it was a local supermarket-type). We got to the supermarket, i gave him the $20 as we were walking in, and then we parted ways. Thirty seconds later i saw him going through the checkout buying cigarettes for $13. I stopped and looked at him quizzically while thinking "You ask me for $20 for medicine for your girlfriend, and then you spend $13 of it on smokes?" When I hadn't said anything, he angrily blurted out "Well, i need some fucking smokes too, don't I?".
After that he avoided me and I never saw that guy close up again before i moved away almost a year later.
Lesson #2: If you loan a man money and you never see him again, that's money well spent.
keywords: old legacy diskettes; cost of disk space; optimization of disk space; stories of technology; History, Technology; Karma Whoring
I have a lot of audio files from my personal digital recorder that i need converted to greppable textfiles. I have absolutely no requirement for realtime function - i'd be very happy to load up a directory of files and leave my computer to think about it for hours/days/weeks for an optimal recognition/transcription.
Has anybody got a tool for something like that? I've been searching for months and found nothing suitable.
Luna, at 2160 miles diameter, often passes by the Earth at 238 855 miles!
This is far scarier than some puny 3 mile asteroid!!
You can even SEE this monstrous danger with the naked eye!!!
Run for your lives! Let hedonism reign!
Just as an example off the top of my head, it's common to write ...
... ...
if (condition = immediate)
On a similiar note, things like
if (pointer = NULL)
always used to find its way into my code by lazy fingers not typing "==". A friend showed me a trick to have the compiler complain and catch this bug. Simply put the constant first, i.e.:
if (NULL = pointer)
which will cause the compiler to barf, so you can correct it with minimal frustration. I cannot believe how much time this simple trick has saved me!
The g64 is going to be commodore's 64GBytes of memory computer to commemorate technology making it possible for them to make a home system that has 2^20 (a.k.a. a binary million) times the memory capacity as the c64 which was a huge wow for its time. A million times! You heard it here, first!
Prior art describing this from Nov 14, 2002.
Online Chat Translation
I hope it is earlier than Microsoft's filing date, that it applies, or maybe that the patent office decides it is "obvious".