Please tell me where the word "Windows" even appears in this license. I don't see it. Maybe you should actually read them before you make such comments.
That would be the
Limited Permissive License. The Ms-PL might stand a chance of being accepted by OSI, the LPL however will not. Which is also why they haven't submitted that one to OSI.
The only difference between the PL and the CL seems to be the Reciprocal Grants condition present in the CL, which is somewhat akin to what the GPL says about being required to distribute the source and the license along with the binary. The PL, then, seems somewhat closed to the BSD license in that you only have to retain the copyright notices. However, both licenses say,
If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
Wonder what licenses apply here? Presumably other OSI licenses if the MS licenses get OSI-approved?
Regardless of all that, I still don't see the point of these licenses. There are plenty of good Open Source licenses out there for people to choose from, why the hell would I choose this one? Somehow I find it hard to believe in MS's genuine goodwill. Call me prejudiced, but I don't trust these licenses. If MS were genuinely interested in Open Source, they'd use a known approved license instead of coming up with their own.
Note: I am not a physicist, this is just what I remember from a quantum computing lecture I attended years ago. Of course, rather than believing 100% in what I wrote, you're probably better off double-checking on Wikipedia and Google...
The quantum states you're referring to do have something to do with this. However, their number isn't what's important. The interesting thing about the quantum computing world is that such states can be in superposition, that is, it is unclear whether or not the state is one or the other. You can only know that if you measure the state, the outcome will be state A in, say, 30% of the time, and state B in 70%. Now, you could probably extend this to 32 different states, but since we're used to bits, we'll build something where we just use two (for instance linearly polarized photons -- 0 degrees = 0, 90 degrees = 1).
Now, there exist methods (or they're being researched) that allow you to put your bit into a superposition of its states. This could, for instance, be so that measuring the state will produce a 0 exactly half the time. Maybe you could put your Schroedinger cat in the box -- dead=0, alive=1...
This by itself is not particularly exciting. But you could do that for multiple bits (say a 32-qubit word) so that measuring it, you get uniform probability to measure any number between 0 and 4294967295. Where it really gets interesting is when you apply quantum operators to your state: They can transform the state without destroying the superposition, i.e. without measuring it. For instance, if your superposition currently gives you 30% chance for measuring a 0 and 70% for a 1, then a CNOT gate would reverse that probability.
Note, however, that a CNOT is a "controlled not": it has two inputs, the control and the target. The control passes through unchanged, but the target is flipped if and only if the control is 1 (i.e. the target output value is identical to the XOR of the input values). In a quantum world, this lets the two bits be entangled: For instance, if the target bit is 1, then the output of the target is 1 iff the control is 0 (target = NOT control). Now suppose that we create a superposition on the control input -- then the control output will be that same superposition, but the target output will be (NOT control) for all control values. In other words, we've just computed a function for all possible input values at once. And you can build these things larger, to do more useful things, such as with a 32-qubit input.
The problem is, you thus get all possible results at the same time, but it's a superposition, and after measuring, you'll only have one result. Why is this useful? Because for one, you can construct some algorithms that transform the problem in such a way as to give a guaranteed result; in other cases, you'll do multiple samples and after a while you'll get your result -- and for some problems, you'll get it orders of magnitude quicker, on average, than on classical computers.
For instance, the Deutsch-Josza algorithm is such an example. Assume I have a function that does one of two things -- it is either constant over the whole input domain, or it is balanced, that is, it returns 0 for exactly half the possible inputs and 1 for the other half. The function, to you, is a black box. How do you determine quickly whether the function is constant or balanced? On a classical computer, you have to test one more than half the inputs, in the worst case, to find out whether the function is balanced or constant. Using the Deutsch-Josza algorithm, you can solve the problem in *constant* time on a quantum computer.
In other words, quantum computing may be interesting for some number-crunching applications. Of course the true capabilities of such a system are not yet completely understood. But I would think that for desktop computing it's probably not too relevant...
(data is from '96, couldn't find more recent data using a quick google search and I'm too lazy to keep on looking).
For some other sources, check this graphic for per-capita emissions in 2002. For the US, we have about 19.8 tons, while for China it's about 2.2 tons. Using the CIA World Factbook for current population numbers, we get:
For the US, a population of 301,139,947, giving an annual CO2 output of 5,962,570,951 tons.
For China, a population of 1,321,851,888, giving an annual CO2 output of 2,908,074,154 tons.
Of course, there is also Wikipedia:
For total CO2 emissions, we have 5,872,278,000 tons listed for the US, and 3,300,371,000 tons for China (numbers from 2002).
Per capita in 2003, we have the US listed with 19.8 metric tons of CO2 for 2003, and China with 3.2 tons. Leaders of the pack are the US Virgin Islands at 121.3 tons, followed by Qatar at 63.1.
And that is why I was looking at OpenGroupWare, which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem and has a (non-free) Outlook connector. I haven't tried it yet, though.
I get the feeling that you deliberately just chose to cite those articles that claimed to have found a connection between violent video games and violent behavior. However, that article by Williams and Skoric also says right in its abstract (admittedly. I haven't read the rest):
Research on violent video games suggests that play leads to aggressive behavior.
A longitudinal study of an online violent video game with a control group tested for
changes in aggressive cognitions and behaviors. The findings did not support the assertion
that a violent game will cause substantial increases in real-world aggression. The findings
are presented and discussed, along with their implications for research and policy.
And actually, in one of your own posts further down you say,
I emphasized the crucial point that the research to date does not prove that video games cause aggressive behaviours. It also does not prove the opposite.
Also, from skimming the rest of the paper, it also seems to say that that small effects simply have not been proven or disproven to exist. In this case, I think we should stay with the old principle of innocent until proven guilty.
You can sit next to someone eating a peanut with no ill effects.
Not quite true. If peanuts (or peanut-containing snacks) are in the same room as me, standing around openly, then sooner or later my eyes will start to water and burn and my nose starts to run. And mind you, I'm only mildly allergic to peanuts, that is I don't immediately need to be taken to the emergency room if I've eaten something with peanuts in. Other people have it worse.
And really, tzanger's post just aggravates me. Fine, we can send everyone who is "anaphylactic" or in other ways not quite normal to "somewhere safe"... maybe put them in a "school for the weak" or something like that so you, tzanger, don't have to be bothered by it? I guess it's the only solution since not being able to have peanut butter in school seems to be the end of the world for some kids. Health-based segregation, hmm... wonder how much that's going to cost us...
Back from this slightly off-topic rant, of course this is no excuse for Cap'n Crunch's behavior. It's understandable when you know his background, but I'm sure he could explain himself nicely to the smoker next to him to make him stop smoking.
A few links could of course have helped this article... I think contourcrafting.org seems to be more or less the right page for the California project. The videos and animations are quite worth seeing.
For the Loughborough one, the closest I could come up with was Dr Soar's website...
Well, I wouldn't write "f**k you spammer" or anything like that, it makes your entries distinguishable. If you want to ensure having a correct credit card number (except for the CVV code, bug the phisher couldn't verify those directly anyway), you could use something like this quick dirty hack I wrote up a few months ago to spam a phishing site using simple wget queries. To read up on the format of valid credit card numbers, see for instance this article on the anatomy of credit card numbers. The following code worked for me to create numbers that were accepted by a phishing site I spammed:
my $cc = substr("000000" . int(rand(1000000)), -6); # Any format
# Add 9 digits for the account number $cc.= int(rand(900000000))+100000000;
# Check digit: Luhn Code my $checknum = 0; for (my $j = 0; $j < length($cc); $j++) { my $val = substr($cc, $j, 1); if ($j % 2 == 0) { # These will be doubled my $v = 2*$val; $v -= 9 if ($v > 9); $checknum += $v; } else { # These will just be added normally $checknum += $val; } } # The last digit should add up to a multiple of 10 $cc.= ($checknum%10 != 0)?(10-($checknum%10)):'0';
# Output an expiration date (arbitrary, 2007..2015) my $month = int(rand(12))+1; my $year = qw(2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015)[int(rand(9))];
# Random CVV2 code my $cvv = substr("000" . int(rand(1000)), -3);
I say you should've read up on the subject first. (But then again this is Slashdot, after all.) There are some papers available. So, at least the children weren't his first audience but merely the strange byproduct you get when you contact the media.
His stuff is still a bit weird though -- if his stuff were really such a groundbreaking mathematical discovery, it wouldn't have been published in a journal of the International Society for Optical Engineering...
Maybe, though, you can derive more consistent rules for using the IEEE 754 NaN and Inf numbers using his findings, but I'd think he still has a long way to go to prove his findings useful enough for that.
This brings up a somewhat interesting point. I can see the point of using stuff like getFoo() just to access an attribute foo. I think it has its purpose (read-only access), but I can also see that it is rather ugly. Further, in C++ code you sometimes see the use of friend just to provide full access to certain attributes and methods otherwise kept hidden or read-only (through getFoo()) to certain privileged classes and such.
I think sometimes it might be more useful to provide proper access control for attributes and methods, beyond public/private/protected. Maybe more along the lines of POSIX rwx-style access, or even whole ACLs. It might be overkill in most situations, but at least it is flexible and easily documented, with a clear purpose. The getFoo() approach, on the other hand, may work as well, but its real reason and purpose (mosty it is just a type of access control) tend to be unclear.
In 2001, Larry Sanger helped creating the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Now, at the conference "Wizards of OS" in Berlin, he presented a competing project: The "Citizendium" is to be more reliable and correct than its great role model.
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a success: Only five years ago, Jimmy Wales and Lartry Sanger set up the website that every Internet user could contribute to - in the illusory hope that the website would turn into an encyclopedia. This illusion has for the most part come true: Today, Wikipedia is among the 20 most visited websites on the Internet. More than five million articles in over a hundred languages have already been accumulated by unpaid volunteers.
But that isn't enough for Larry Sanger. He sees Wikipedia only as a prototype of what could be accomplished. "I am still a great fan of Wikipedia," Sanger ensures, "but at some point one has to have the courage to start a new project." He criticizes Wikipedia because in his eyes, the project is too focused on amateurism, leaving no room for experts. Sanger knows what he is talking about: He was the first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia but left the project after disputes.
Dispute Over Contents
In the recent months, the question of quality of the Wikipedia articles has come under discussion more and more: Indeed, the volunteer project was considered only marginally worse than the old Encyclopedia Britannica in a comparison in the science magazine "Nature" at the end of last year. But in the recent months, Wikipedia leader Jimmy Wales complained about the quality of its content more and more often.
Among the reasons were several mishaps. Last year, a jokester created a scandal when he implied the esteemed US journalist John Seigenthaler as being involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy - for several months, the lie could be read in Wikipedia, undiscovered. Similarly, Wikipedia made the headlines on several occasions during US election campaigns: US politicians tried to denigrate their opponents in their Wikipedia articles, or to make their own biographies look better.
A Race Against Wikipedia
Wales is trying to counteract these developments. In the past months he has been increasedly campaigning for the involvement of scientists in the encyclopedia. But these efforts have stagnated. For months, Wales has been announcing the creation of "stable" article versions which should be more reliable than normal articles. The implementation is still not there. At the end of this year, initial experiments are set to start in the German Wikipedia.
Sanger acts optimistic about reaching the goal earlier than his former employer: "I will show them how to do this," Sanger said in Berlin.
Experts Instead of Amateurs
The main difference to Wikipedia: There will be no anonymous contributions in the new project. Every participant is expected to sign up with their real name - in Wikipedia one usually does not even have to sign up to help writing articles.
Another difference: Sanger wants to spend more time campaigning for experts in his online encyclopedia and give them more authority. Qualified editors are to decide authoritatively on open questions while in Wikipedia, some discussions and disputes last for months or even years.
"You don't need a PhD to be accepted as an expert in Citizendium," Sanger says. On the other hand, the title alone does not suffice to attain the privileged Expert status. Whoever wants to apply for an Expert position in the Citizendium needs to present a resume on his user page. But people will be able to write articles even without special qualifications.
Funding Still Unclear
It is still unclear how exactly the project aims to obtain funding. Sanger is counting on potent sponsors. Years ago he had been hired for US millionaire Joe Firmage's "Di
It does seem to be a bit buggy. About half the time, when the other player wants to pass, I click "Pass" as well. The message changes to "Waiting on your partner to pass," and a moment later changes back to "Your partner wants to pass." My Pass button is already inactive since I'd already pressed it. After this, nothing more happens and I have to end that session without taking any points along.
That happened to me in Firefox 1.5.0.4 (Debian). Has anyone had the same problems?
You could, however, take your PC and a reasonably good microphone and make a recording. While that won't make it any more audible, the waveform or spectral display will make the tone quite visible. The question is, of course, whether that'll actually convince anyone...
You could invite a cop over and make a sample recording of your voice somewhere inside your house, and show him what the spectrum looks like. Also, maybe make a sample silent recording just to demonstrate the effect on the spectral display. Prepare an artificial file with a sound wave of increasing pitch. Show him what the spectrum looks like and ask him at what frequency he stops hearing anything. Show him visually that just because he doesn't hear anything doesn't mean there's nothing to hear.
Then (having tested this before of course), take the mic outside to wherever that Mosquito thing is clearly audible to you. Take a recording, show him the spectrum visualization. I think you should have a case then.
A poor person in the West gets free housing, food vouchers, dole money, and jobs round every corner. A poor person in India starves to death. I applaud these companies for sending jobs to where they're needed the most.
That's a good point. The downside is that that's not the incentive -- the incentive is that it's cheaper. And companies, trying to reduce costs, pick third-world countries simply because they're cheaper. Unfortunately, as a result, they tend to pick those where the respective labor rights are practically non-existent. Admittedly this doesn't hold as much for call center outsourcing because of a better level of education needed, but it holds true for, say, clothes. The further advantage is that not only does the absence of most labor rights lower the costs, but outsourcing to, say, a Guatemalan or Indonesian company also seemingly relieves the main company of the responsibility for the well-being of their workforce.
I don't necessarily have a problem with jobs wandering off to third-world countries or such, but I do have a problem with the exploitation that results from the fact that companies just look for the lowest bidder instead of actively trying to increase the standard of living in the countries they outsource to.
Imagine that the USA would expand to include Mexico and middle-american states "because there are so many people there that want to work and expand our economy". That would be like what the EU does.
The reason it's capatalist is because it's all optional. They are just selling a service. If you don't want it, you don't have to have it. You can instead thake the $40/month or whatever (it's fairly cheap) and put it in a savings account, and then use that acocunt int he event of a problem. There's nobody holding a gun to your head making you pay.
The socialist version would be if there was government mandidated payments for this, and specificly if the rich paid more so the poor could have it without paying. The reason it's socalist is the government is forcing you to pay. You might feel like you don't need to insure your goods, perhaps they arne't worth that much, perhaps you make enough to easily replace them, but the govenrment says "Too bad, everybody pays. Pay up or go to jail."
Yup, it's all optional. It's also optional for the insurance company to actually insure you. If you're too high-risk or too poor, you can be denied.
Now, in a pure capitalist system where the "free market" alone regulates things, what would be the incentive to support the weak or the poor? I can't think of one.
Take, for example, health insurance. Insurance is, as the GP said, about "spreading risk from the individual across a broader population." Now, if you considered yourself, say, [hw]ealthy enough not to need insurance, you are firstly taking any risk just yourself and may one day discover in a bad accident or some such that it was a bad idea. You never know. But secondly and more importantly, by not participating in this insurance you also deny others your solidarity should they need help. You could instead consider the fact that you're participating in some public insurance (or welfare) scheme as a way of contributing to the well-being of society. Socialist? Maybe. Inherently a bad idea? Definitely not. It's tempting to call the refusal to pay into a welfare system antisocial.
Until anyone can come up with a purely capitalistic model for insurance/welfare that inherently (and not by government mandate or somesuch) guarantees equal opportunity for everyone, I'd rather stick with a government-mandated system, thank you very much. You are free to complain about certain inadequacies of such systems as they are found in your country, but I refuse to bury the idea as such.
This product seems to receive the entire spectrum by default.
No. The USRP motherboard is capable of handling anything from DC to 2.9 GHz, but you need the matching daughterboards for specific ranges. Daughterboards include:
BasicRX, 0.1-300 MHz receive
BasicTX, 0.1-200 MHz transmit
LFRX, DC-30 MHz receive
LFTX, DC-30 MHz transmit
TVRX, 50-860 MHz receive
DBSRX, 800-2400 MHz receive
RFX400, 400-500 MHz Transceiver
RFX900, 800-1000 MHz Transceiver
RFX1200, 1150-1400 MHz Transceiver
RFX1800, 1500-2100 MHz Transceiver
RFX2400, 2250-2900 MHz Transceiver
Also, you obviously need to have the matching antenna to actually receive something useful in a given frequency range.
Now, whether or not receiving particular frequencies is allowed or not will obviously depend on the FCC and similar regulatory organizations (in most, if not all countries, for instance, receiving police radio frquencies is illegal). Maybe the FCC regulation you mentioned is taking things a bit too far... cell phone standards like GSM are encrypted anyway (unless, of course, you go for a man in the middle attack).
As to your FCC quote, I suppose the question is whether being able to buy another daughterboard/antenna means it can be "readily altered to receive such frequencies." With respect to transmitting, the FAQ states that since it's sold as test equipment, you don't need a license. I wonder if the "test equipment" status supersedes that FCC statement as well?
Spam: We're placing the blame on AOL for this now?
Well, not really, obviously. But from my brief AOL experience in '98 or so, I do remember hooking up a friend's computer to AOL, only to come back two weeks later and and finding her inbox swamped in dozens of Spam mails. In that respect, AOL was quite unique. At the same time, my email account was spam-free, and that only changed when I made the mistake of using it in Usenet posts (hey, I was still a kid).
At the time, AOL inboxes apparently managed to fill with Spam from the moment they were created.
And yeah, the billions of free AOL coasters in my mail and just about everywhere else were a definite nuisance. So, maybe AOL wasn't quite as bad as this article makes it out to be, but I think it does deserve a spot somewhere on this list.
No, it doesn't. But does it have to? For 90% of the people in need of an image editing software, the Gimp will be just fine. And who says you shouldn't have to do some work for making a switch? I don't count the "but it's different" argument. Missing features make a more justified argument, but saying GNU/Linux sucks just because apps are a bit different really isn't a good point.
2) Pagemaker is a LOT better than Draw
LaTeX isn't a replacement for Pagemaker and similar software, but Scribus is. Sure, it's far from being as good as the software available on Win/Mac. But do cut them some slack, it's a great piece of software, and, again, it will suffice for more than 50% of the people out there who need such software.
4) [...] Access
You got that right, but Access does have another thing going for it -- rapid prototyping of simple database apps. If there were a similar GUI tool available that could use a (My|Postgre)SQL backend, that would be great... (of course such things may already exist? Never looked...)
5) [...] PDF Converters
In my eyes GNU software is, for most everyday use, superior to existing proprietary software when it comes to PDF handling. Your standard GNU/Linux desktop will let you create PDFs easily -- sure, not with all the great features that Acrobat might offer you. But you can create PDFs, for free -- no Acrobat necessary, and much more hassle-free than digging around for random Windows shareware/freeware PDF tools.
In the end, Windows/MacOS sure is easier. That's why I still haven't converted my parents or my sister to GNU/Linux. But we should also consider the great progress that has been made on the Free software desktop front and give some credit to the volunteers responsible for it.
Another point to make: surely much great software is available for Mac/Windows. But remember most costs money, and think about how many people you know that use a pirated version of some software or other. Moving them to a free system at some point will at least mean that they finally have a legal system installed. I think that's a very worthy point.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be the Limited Permissive License. The Ms-PL might stand a chance of being accepted by OSI, the LPL however will not. Which is also why they haven't submitted that one to OSI.
The only difference between the PL and the CL seems to be the Reciprocal Grants condition present in the CL, which is somewhat akin to what the GPL says about being required to distribute the source and the license along with the binary. The PL, then, seems somewhat closed to the BSD license in that you only have to retain the copyright notices. However, both licenses say,
Wonder what licenses apply here? Presumably other OSI licenses if the MS licenses get OSI-approved?
Regardless of all that, I still don't see the point of these licenses. There are plenty of good Open Source licenses out there for people to choose from, why the hell would I choose this one? Somehow I find it hard to believe in MS's genuine goodwill. Call me prejudiced, but I don't trust these licenses. If MS were genuinely interested in Open Source, they'd use a known approved license instead of coming up with their own.
Note: I am not a physicist, this is just what I remember from a quantum computing lecture I attended years ago. Of course, rather than believing 100% in what I wrote, you're probably better off double-checking on Wikipedia and Google...
The quantum states you're referring to do have something to do with this. However, their number isn't what's important.
The interesting thing about the quantum computing world is that such states can be in superposition, that is, it is unclear whether or not the state is one or the other. You can only know that if you measure the state, the outcome will be state A in, say, 30% of the time, and state B in 70%. Now, you could probably extend this to 32 different states, but since we're used to bits, we'll build something where we just use two (for instance linearly polarized photons -- 0 degrees = 0, 90 degrees = 1).
Now, there exist methods (or they're being researched) that allow you to put your bit into a superposition of its states. This could, for instance, be so that measuring the state will produce a 0 exactly half the time. Maybe you could put your Schroedinger cat in the box -- dead=0, alive=1...
This by itself is not particularly exciting. But you could do that for multiple bits (say a 32-qubit word) so that measuring it, you get uniform probability to measure any number between 0 and 4294967295. Where it really gets interesting is when you apply quantum operators to your state: They can transform the state without destroying the superposition, i.e. without measuring it. For instance, if your superposition currently gives you 30% chance for measuring a 0 and 70% for a 1, then a CNOT gate would reverse that probability.
Note, however, that a CNOT is a "controlled not": it has two inputs, the control and the target. The control passes through unchanged, but the target is flipped if and only if the control is 1 (i.e. the target output value is identical to the XOR of the input values). In a quantum world, this lets the two bits be entangled: For instance, if the target bit is 1, then the output of the target is 1 iff the control is 0 (target = NOT control). Now suppose that we create a superposition on the control input -- then the control output will be that same superposition, but the target output will be (NOT control) for all control values. In other words, we've just computed a function for all possible input values at once. And you can build these things larger, to do more useful things, such as with a 32-qubit input.
The problem is, you thus get all possible results at the same time, but it's a superposition, and after measuring, you'll only have one result. Why is this useful? Because for one, you can construct some algorithms that transform the problem in such a way as to give a guaranteed result; in other cases, you'll do multiple samples and after a while you'll get your result -- and for some problems, you'll get it orders of magnitude quicker, on average, than on classical computers.
For instance, the Deutsch-Josza algorithm is such an example. Assume I have a function that does one of two things -- it is either constant over the whole input domain, or it is balanced, that is, it returns 0 for exactly half the possible inputs and 1 for the other half. The function, to you, is a black box. How do you determine quickly whether the function is constant or balanced? On a classical computer, you have to test one more than half the inputs, in the worst case, to find out whether the function is balanced or constant. Using the Deutsch-Josza algorithm, you can solve the problem in *constant* time on a quantum computer.
In other words, quantum computing may be interesting for some number-crunching applications. Of course the true capabilities of such a system are not yet completely understood. But I would think that for desktop computing it's probably not too relevant...
For some other sources, check this graphic for per-capita emissions in 2002. For the US, we have about 19.8 tons, while for China it's about 2.2 tons. Using the CIA World Factbook for current population numbers, we get:
Of course, there is also Wikipedia:
And that is why I was looking at OpenGroupWare, which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem and has a (non-free) Outlook connector. I haven't tried it yet, though.
Does anyone have experience with OGW?
I get the feeling that you deliberately just chose to cite those articles that claimed to have found a connection between violent video games and violent behavior. However, that article by Williams and Skoric also says right in its abstract (admittedly. I haven't read the rest):
And actually, in one of your own posts further down you say,
Also, from skimming the rest of the paper, it also seems to say that that small effects simply have not been proven or disproven to exist. In this case, I think we should stay with the old principle of innocent until proven guilty.
So, what is your point?
Nietzsche, of course. "802.11g is dead."
...they'd be called French Fighters.
Well, there's nothing stopping you from making redundant copies of the needed data. It's read-only.
Not quite true. If peanuts (or peanut-containing snacks) are in the same room as me, standing around openly, then sooner or later my eyes will start to water and burn and my nose starts to run. And mind you, I'm only mildly allergic to peanuts, that is I don't immediately need to be taken to the emergency room if I've eaten something with peanuts in. Other people have it worse.
And really, tzanger's post just aggravates me. Fine, we can send everyone who is "anaphylactic" or in other ways not quite normal to "somewhere safe"... maybe put them in a "school for the weak" or something like that so you, tzanger, don't have to be bothered by it? I guess it's the only solution since not being able to have peanut butter in school seems to be the end of the world for some kids. Health-based segregation, hmm... wonder how much that's going to cost us...
Back from this slightly off-topic rant, of course this is no excuse for Cap'n Crunch's behavior. It's understandable when you know his background, but I'm sure he could explain himself nicely to the smoker next to him to make him stop smoking.
A few links could of course have helped this article... I think contourcrafting.org seems to be more or less the right page for the California project. The videos and animations are quite worth seeing.
For the Loughborough one, the closest I could come up with was Dr Soar's website...
Well, I wouldn't write "f**k you spammer" or anything like that, it makes your entries distinguishable. If you want to ensure having a correct credit card number (except for the CVV code, bug the phisher couldn't verify those directly anyway), you could use something like this quick dirty hack I wrote up a few months ago to spam a phishing site using simple wget queries. To read up on the format of valid credit card numbers, see for instance this article on the anatomy of credit card numbers. The following code worked for me to create numbers that were accepted by a phishing site I spammed:
Also, there's a paper available that provides more details.
I say you should've read up on the subject first. (But then again this is Slashdot, after all.) There are some papers available. So, at least the children weren't his first audience but merely the strange byproduct you get when you contact the media.
His stuff is still a bit weird though -- if his stuff were really such a groundbreaking mathematical discovery, it wouldn't have been published in a journal of the International Society for Optical Engineering...
Maybe, though, you can derive more consistent rules for using the IEEE 754 NaN and Inf numbers using his findings, but I'd think he still has a long way to go to prove his findings useful enough for that.
This brings up a somewhat interesting point. I can see the point of using stuff like getFoo() just to access an attribute foo. I think it has its purpose (read-only access), but I can also see that it is rather ugly. Further, in C++ code you sometimes see the use of friend just to provide full access to certain attributes and methods otherwise kept hidden or read-only (through getFoo()) to certain privileged classes and such.
I think sometimes it might be more useful to provide proper access control for attributes and methods, beyond public/private/protected. Maybe more along the lines of POSIX rwx-style access, or even whole ACLs. It might be overkill in most situations, but at least it is flexible and easily documented, with a clear purpose. The getFoo() approach, on the other hand, may work as well, but its real reason and purpose (mosty it is just a type of access control) tend to be unclear.
Here you go:
It does seem to be a bit buggy. About half the time, when the other player wants to pass, I click "Pass" as well. The message changes to "Waiting on your partner to pass," and a moment later changes back to "Your partner wants to pass." My Pass button is already inactive since I'd already pressed it. After this, nothing more happens and I have to end that session without taking any points along.
That happened to me in Firefox 1.5.0.4 (Debian). Has anyone had the same problems?
You could, however, take your PC and a reasonably good microphone and make a recording. While that won't make it any more audible, the waveform or spectral display will make the tone quite visible. The question is, of course, whether that'll actually convince anyone...
:)
You could invite a cop over and make a sample recording of your voice somewhere inside your house, and show him what the spectrum looks like. Also, maybe make a sample silent recording just to demonstrate the effect on the spectral display. Prepare an artificial file with a sound wave of increasing pitch. Show him what the spectrum looks like and ask him at what frequency he stops hearing anything. Show him visually that just because he doesn't hear anything doesn't mean there's nothing to hear.
Then (having tested this before of course), take the mic outside to wherever that Mosquito thing is clearly audible to you. Take a recording, show him the spectrum visualization. I think you should have a case then.
There's your News-for-Nerds-worthy answer.
That's a good point. The downside is that that's not the incentive -- the incentive is that it's cheaper. And companies, trying to reduce costs, pick third-world countries simply because they're cheaper. Unfortunately, as a result, they tend to pick those where the respective labor rights are practically non-existent. Admittedly this doesn't hold as much for call center outsourcing because of a better level of education needed, but it holds true for, say, clothes. The further advantage is that not only does the absence of most labor rights lower the costs, but outsourcing to, say, a Guatemalan or Indonesian company also seemingly relieves the main company of the responsibility for the well-being of their workforce.
I don't necessarily have a problem with jobs wandering off to third-world countries or such, but I do have a problem with the exploitation that results from the fact that companies just look for the lowest bidder instead of actively trying to increase the standard of living in the countries they outsource to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA
Yup, it's all optional. It's also optional for the insurance company to actually insure you. If you're too high-risk or too poor, you can be denied.
Now, in a pure capitalist system where the "free market" alone regulates things, what would be the incentive to support the weak or the poor? I can't think of one.
Take, for example, health insurance. Insurance is, as the GP said, about "spreading risk from the individual across a broader population." Now, if you considered yourself, say, [hw]ealthy enough not to need insurance, you are firstly taking any risk just yourself and may one day discover in a bad accident or some such that it was a bad idea. You never know. But secondly and more importantly, by not participating in this insurance you also deny others your solidarity should they need help. You could instead consider the fact that you're participating in some public insurance (or welfare) scheme as a way of contributing to the well-being of society. Socialist? Maybe. Inherently a bad idea? Definitely not. It's tempting to call the refusal to pay into a welfare system antisocial.
Until anyone can come up with a purely capitalistic model for insurance/welfare that inherently (and not by government mandate or somesuch) guarantees equal opportunity for everyone, I'd rather stick with a government-mandated system, thank you very much. You are free to complain about certain inadequacies of such systems as they are found in your country, but I refuse to bury the idea as such.
No. The USRP motherboard is capable of handling anything from DC to 2.9 GHz, but you need the matching daughterboards for specific ranges. Daughterboards include:
Also, you obviously need to have the matching antenna to actually receive something useful in a given frequency range.
Now, whether or not receiving particular frequencies is allowed or not will obviously depend on the FCC and similar regulatory organizations (in most, if not all countries, for instance, receiving police radio frquencies is illegal). Maybe the FCC regulation you mentioned is taking things a bit too far... cell phone standards like GSM are encrypted anyway (unless, of course, you go for a man in the middle attack).
As to your FCC quote, I suppose the question is whether being able to buy another daughterboard/antenna means it can be "readily altered to receive such frequencies." With respect to transmitting, the FAQ states that since it's sold as test equipment, you don't need a license. I wonder if the "test equipment" status supersedes that FCC statement as well?
Well, not really, obviously. But from my brief AOL experience in '98 or so, I do remember hooking up a friend's computer to AOL, only to come back two weeks later and and finding her inbox swamped in dozens of Spam mails. In that respect, AOL was quite unique. At the same time, my email account was spam-free, and that only changed when I made the mistake of using it in Usenet posts (hey, I was still a kid).
At the time, AOL inboxes apparently managed to fill with Spam from the moment they were created.
And yeah, the billions of free AOL coasters in my mail and just about everywhere else were a definite nuisance. So, maybe AOL wasn't quite as bad as this article makes it out to be, but I think it does deserve a spot somewhere on this list.
Even simpler:
No, it doesn't. But does it have to? For 90% of the people in need of an image editing software, the Gimp will be just fine. And who says you shouldn't have to do some work for making a switch? I don't count the "but it's different" argument. Missing features make a more justified argument, but saying GNU/Linux sucks just because apps are a bit different really isn't a good point.
LaTeX isn't a replacement for Pagemaker and similar software, but Scribus is. Sure, it's far from being as good as the software available on Win/Mac. But do cut them some slack, it's a great piece of software, and, again, it will suffice for more than 50% of the people out there who need such software.
You got that right, but Access does have another thing going for it -- rapid prototyping of simple database apps. If there were a similar GUI tool available that could use a (My|Postgre)SQL backend, that would be great... (of course such things may already exist? Never looked...)
In my eyes GNU software is, for most everyday use, superior to existing proprietary software when it comes to PDF handling. Your standard GNU/Linux desktop will let you create PDFs easily -- sure, not with all the great features that Acrobat might offer you. But you can create PDFs, for free -- no Acrobat necessary, and much more hassle-free than digging around for random Windows shareware/freeware PDF tools.
In the end, Windows/MacOS sure is easier. That's why I still haven't converted my parents or my sister to GNU/Linux. But we should also consider the great progress that has been made on the Free software desktop front and give some credit to the volunteers responsible for it.
Another point to make: surely much great software is available for Mac/Windows. But remember most costs money, and think about how many people you know that use a pirated version of some software or other. Moving them to a free system at some point will at least mean that they finally have a legal system installed. I think that's a very worthy point.