Some people's enthousiasm may be dulled from the fact that this ruling only applies to the coutry of Norway. Fear not, I think this will have subtle but far-reaching consequences, especially for those of us in the EU.
Even though Norway is not part of the EU, I'm sure people over here will pay attention and (hopefully) it will help sink that DMCA-like abomination the EC has been mulling over for a few years now for good.
It's happening. People are starting to pay attention. With most households owning a DVD player, things like "region code" are filtering down to the masses, and people are a lot more receptive when you attempt to explain how CSS, end-to-end encryption and the DMCA affect what they can (and are allowed) to do with digital media they payed for.
You have to understand that the sun is many many many times brighter than the parthenon. The exposures of the sun alone would appear as a completely black surface with a white spot.
My guess is that the exposure of the parthenon was taken either before or after the solar ones (most likely after) when the sun was not in the camera's FOV (i.e. at another time of day). This is the reason that the shadows on the partenon look wrong.
Since the sun is so bright, the rest of the film is still relatively unexposed, and the picture of the parthenon (inc. cloud) can be taken more or less as if it were a regular photograph.
Incredible as it may sound, only seven times has someone ever managed to successfully image the solar analemma as a multi-exposure on a single piece of film.
"Single piece of film" is apparently one of the requirements. You could do it with a digital camera, but then it wouldn't count...
My knowledge of the german language is sketchy, my knowledge of german law is absolutely non-existent. I would like though to try and propose a possible work-around.
What about going full-disclosure about it?
What about providing all the details of the request in the confirmation email, including timestamp, IP adress, browser ID, referrer, etc?
In that way, the recipient can see who was responsible for signing up and can take out their issues on them.
Of course, the operator of the mailing list should be ready and willing to provide the same information under oath to a court of law.
... because the Linux kernel used a significant amount of gcc-specific functionality.
I have the impression that a significant point is the difference in assembler syntax. GCC uses the AT&T syntax, where the register you want to store into comes last, while the Intel compilers (and just about any other x86-native tool) uses the Intel syntax, where the distination register is the first one in the list. There are other differences as well, regardign the way type information and indirection is handled.
My impression is that Intel does not want to implement an AT&T style assembler parser, and the GCC folks got bothered so much about Intel syntax by all the x86 newbies that they'd rather jump off a cliff.
What law makes it illegal to ignore the robots.txt? I've never heard of any.
That's not what i said.
I was basically arguing a standard due-diligence case.
If (and only if) the providers of a service make it known they do not want you to do certain things (spidering for email address harvesting) and if (and only if) they take suitable technological measures to make their wish known to unattended operation in which a human would otherwise not actually get to see the agreement (robots.txt) and if (and only if) the other conditions from contract law can be shown to be fulfilled (willing, bona fide etc.), then it can be argued that such an agreement is binding.
On the other hand, if the service provider is lax in protecting their service and/or assets (and therefore does not excersise due diligence) by either stating improper conditions or not implementing standard protocols to prevent automated retrieval (robots.txt), it is very likely the judge will, after hearing a few expert witnesses, decide that the plaintiff did not excersise due diligence and rule in favour of the defendant.
Because when you visit a site one might reasonally expect NOT to be forced into buying something just by visiting that site. That is simply rediculous, and the judge knows it. Disallowing harvesting email addresses and using them for non-personal purposes is ethically, morally and law-technically perfectly normal, and a judge here takes that into account.
This is a very important point, and one that warrants extra attention.
Dutch contract law (much as contract law anywhere else in the world) requires contracts to be entered willingly and in good faith. This is something that the Dutch courts don't just pay lip service to.
In the case of the hypothetical car dealer, a client that was somehow directed to the page would most likely not have entered in the contract willingly. Proving mala fide would also be a rather easy job for the defense.
As people often say, It's not just common sense: it's THE LAW!
"by searching our database you agree with the conditions of use". So i guess the judge has a point here...
I think the main crux of the case is not only related to how prominently the conditions are stated, but also to whether the terms & conditions are relevant to the subject. In this case demanding that the information obtained from the emailgids (i.e. email adresses) site is not to be used for spamming is relevant and directly related to the content of the site.
On the other hand, more outlandish claims (By browsing this site you renounce the right to sue XXY inc, By viewing this logo you agree not to publish unfavourable reviews of the service, etc.) will have a harder time being upheld in court.
So, is Google illegal too, when it crawls the Web without obeying conditions written on some WWW page with an Accept button?
We have a well-established protocol that allows site operators to tell webspider operators that they would prefer them to stay away: the robots.txt.
I imagine that if a dutch counterpart google had an indexbot that did not respect the contents of robots.txt and violated the conditions of a certain site, they could be successfully sued under this new ruling.
On the other hand, if the indexbot "plays nice" and the site owners forgot to set up the robots.txt, the judge will probably rule in favour of the defendant.
I do not like this ruling a bit, and being in the Netherlands i fear it might be cause for concern. But frankly, overreacting does no-one any good.
If you don't know the puzzle in question (i didn't), here it is:
100 Prisoners and a Light Bulb
There are 100 prisoners, each kept in their own isolated cell. Each day one prisoner is chosen at random and taken into a central room where there is a light. The light is either ON or OFF. The prisoner may view the light and turn it on or off if they like, before being returned to their cell. The prisoner may also guess that all the prisoners have been into the exercise room at some time so far. If they are right then all go free. If they are wrong then everyone is shot. The prisoners are allowed to confer before being imprisoned, but may not communicate once in prison. (You may assume that the light starts OFF)
Can you find an algorithm which garauntees release of the prisoners eventually? How many days do you expect to wait for the prisoners to be released?
Find an algorithm which has the smallest number of expected days until the prisoners are released. Do this for every possible number of prisoners.
A certain "A. Walkman" claims to have found the optimum solution in 1966, and published it in "Information and Control":
Waksman, A. An optimum solution to the firing squad synchronization problem. Information and Control 9 (1966), 66--78.
Unfortunately, the article does not seem to be available online.
If anyone decides to take a quick trip down to the library, I would be delighted if they could share the answer.
The first time I heard of biodegradable pastics manufactured from things usually regarded as food was in the late 1980s. The Italian company Montedison had developed a compound from corn that they called Mater-Bi, and you could get a watch made out of the stuff with the italian version of the mickey mouse magazine.
The only practical applications that I have seen so far are things like this bio-degradable bag, for groceries and waste disposal.
Speaking as the person that usually gets phoned up whenever a computer starts acting up, I would really appreciate a maintenance free solution that would allow people to browse the internet and write documents. Even if it is made by Microsoft.
Let's hear it for being only one step behind Microsoft! Yay!
This is one of the most commonly heard objections to interoperability software of any kind. It is usually formulated in terms of the specification being a "moving target" and that "MS can break it any time they want".
This is rubbish.
What gives Microsoft leverage over the desktop market is their present installed population. They can't go around breaking compatibility with existing products, as they cannot expect everyone to upgrade everything immidiately. The CIFS specification itself might be a "moving target", but the actual implementations in the field that it needs to be able to interoperate with are not.
As amazing as it sounds, vendor lock-in works both ways.
In physics, you don't get real randomness without quantum effects, but statistical processes can give you highly unpredictable numbers, unless you're prepared to do faster-than-real-time molecular dynamics on 10^23 particles.
OO programming is just a though pattern, and it can be applied to almost any problem.
Let's consider an example you're probably familiar with, a finite element program.
In a finite element program you would probably have an object "Mesh" that holds all your elements. Now as you probably know you can have all sorts of different element types with different solution methods. These can all be implemented as subclasses of an abstract "Element" class. A method element->solve() (or solutionIteration() or similar) would then take care of hiding the different solution methods from the higher layers of the program.
If you want you can extend this method even further, implementing a Node object that can be shared by multiple elements. By subclassing the nodes you can implement things like boundary conditions.
You see, the problem now becomes a connected forest of objects that are rather uniform, but can have their own specific rules of behaviour when needed.
I'm not saying this is not possible with regular procedural code, people have been writing procedural finite element simulations for years. What i'm saying is that if you want to bring some architectural sanity into the world of computational science (and god knows it needs it...) OO might help.
Note that if for whatever reason you cannot/do not want to use an OO language, you can still think OO. You can then implement the thing using a regular procedural language that has some way of keeping data together in a logical way. Structs in C are perfectly suited for this task. This way you might miss some of the neat OO features, but the resulting code will at least have the advantage of keeping data and related code together.
Slashdot Mirror
The buttons have two states, so it's 4*2^4
Do you think so? I find the control half a bit too "retro".
I'm quite certain the phrase is "beyond reasonable doubt".
Even though Norway is not part of the EU, I'm sure people over here will pay attention and (hopefully) it will help sink that DMCA-like abomination the EC has been mulling over for a few years now for good.
It's happening. People are starting to pay attention. With most households owning a DVD player, things like "region code" are filtering down to the masses, and people are a lot more receptive when you attempt to explain how CSS, end-to-end encryption and the DMCA affect what they can (and are allowed) to do with digital media they payed for.
And most people do not like it one bit.
My guess is that the reports of the death of Moore's Law will turn out to be greatly exaggerated.
My guess is that the exposure of the parthenon was taken either before or after the solar ones (most likely after) when the sun was not in the camera's FOV (i.e. at another time of day). This is the reason that the shadows on the partenon look wrong.
Since the sun is so bright, the rest of the film is still relatively unexposed, and the picture of the parthenon (inc. cloud) can be taken more or less as if it were a regular photograph.
"Single piece of film" is apparently one of the requirements. You could do it with a digital camera, but then it wouldn't count...
What about going full-disclosure about it?
What about providing all the details of the request in the confirmation email, including timestamp, IP adress, browser ID, referrer, etc?
In that way, the recipient can see who was responsible for signing up and can take out their issues on them.
Of course, the operator of the mailing list should be ready and willing to provide the same information under oath to a court of law.
I have the impression that a significant point is the difference in assembler syntax. GCC uses the AT&T syntax, where the register you want to store into comes last, while the Intel compilers (and just about any other x86-native tool) uses the Intel syntax, where the distination register is the first one in the list. There are other differences as well, regardign the way type information and indirection is handled.
My impression is that Intel does not want to implement an AT&T style assembler parser, and the GCC folks got bothered so much about Intel syntax by all the x86 newbies that they'd rather jump off a cliff.
That's not what i said.
I was basically arguing a standard due-diligence case.
If (and only if) the providers of a service make it known they do not want you to do certain things (spidering for email address harvesting) and if (and only if) they take suitable technological measures to make their wish known to unattended operation in which a human would otherwise not actually get to see the agreement (robots.txt) and if (and only if) the other conditions from contract law can be shown to be fulfilled (willing, bona fide etc.), then it can be argued that such an agreement is binding.
On the other hand, if the service provider is lax in protecting their service and/or assets (and therefore does not excersise due diligence) by either stating improper conditions or not implementing standard protocols to prevent automated retrieval (robots.txt), it is very likely the judge will, after hearing a few expert witnesses, decide that the plaintiff did not excersise due diligence and rule in favour of the defendant.
Is this any clearer?
Makes the Sun Community Source License seem simple.
This is a very important point, and one that warrants extra attention.
Dutch contract law (much as contract law anywhere else in the world) requires contracts to be entered willingly and in good faith. This is something that the Dutch courts don't just pay lip service to.
In the case of the hypothetical car dealer, a client that was somehow directed to the page would most likely not have entered in the contract willingly. Proving mala fide would also be a rather easy job for the defense.
As people often say, It's not just common sense: it's THE LAW!
So i guess the judge has a point here...
I think the main crux of the case is not only related to how prominently the conditions are stated, but also to whether the terms & conditions are relevant to the subject. In this case demanding that the information obtained from the emailgids (i.e. email adresses) site is not to be used for spamming is relevant and directly related to the content of the site.
On the other hand, more outlandish claims (By browsing this site you renounce the right to sue XXY inc, By viewing this logo you agree not to publish unfavourable reviews of the service, etc.) will have a harder time being upheld in court.
Here's to hoping...
We have a well-established protocol that allows site operators to tell webspider operators that they would prefer them to stay away: the robots.txt.
I imagine that if a dutch counterpart google had an indexbot that did not respect the contents of robots.txt and violated the conditions of a certain site, they could be successfully sued under this new ruling.
On the other hand, if the indexbot "plays nice" and the site owners forgot to set up the robots.txt, the judge will probably rule in favour of the defendant.
I do not like this ruling a bit, and being in the Netherlands i fear it might be cause for concern. But frankly, overreacting does no-one any good.
Once the money's in the bag though, anything can happen!
Think of it as a table that gives an output state at time t+1 as a function of the input states at time t.
Waksman, A. An optimum solution to the firing squad synchronization problem. Information and Control 9 (1966), 66--78.
Unfortunately, the article does not seem to be available online.
If anyone decides to take a quick trip down to the library, I would be delighted if they could share the answer.
The Italian company Montedison had developed a compound from corn that they called Mater-Bi, and you could get a watch made out of the stuff with the italian version of the mickey mouse magazine.
The only practical applications that I have seen so far are things like this bio-degradable bag, for groceries and waste disposal.
Speaking as the person that usually gets phoned up whenever a computer starts acting up, I would really appreciate a maintenance free solution that would allow people to browse the internet and write documents. Even if it is made by Microsoft.
This is one of the most commonly heard objections to interoperability software of any kind. It is usually formulated in terms of the specification being a "moving target" and that "MS can break it any time they want".
This is rubbish.
What gives Microsoft leverage over the desktop market is their present installed population. They can't go around breaking compatibility with existing products, as they cannot expect everyone to upgrade everything immidiately. The CIFS specification itself might be a "moving target", but the actual implementations in the field that it needs to be able to interoperate with are not.
As amazing as it sounds, vendor lock-in works both ways.
Also spots 39 and 40, since the Cray T3E is basically a very fast toroidal interconnect and Alpha processors.
And even then, Lyapunov instability will get you.
In a finite element program you would probably have an object "Mesh" that holds all your elements. Now as you probably know you can have all sorts of different element types with different solution methods. These can all be implemented as subclasses of an abstract "Element" class. A method element->solve() (or solutionIteration() or similar) would then take care of hiding the different solution methods from the higher layers of the program.
If you want you can extend this method even further, implementing a Node object that can be shared by multiple elements. By subclassing the nodes you can implement things like boundary conditions.
You see, the problem now becomes a connected forest of objects that are rather uniform, but can have their own specific rules of behaviour when needed.
I'm not saying this is not possible with regular procedural code, people have been writing procedural finite element simulations for years. What i'm saying is that if you want to bring some architectural sanity into the world of computational science (and god knows it needs it...) OO might help.
Note that if for whatever reason you cannot/do not want to use an OO language, you can still think OO. You can then implement the thing using a regular procedural language that has some way of keeping data together in a logical way. Structs in C are perfectly suited for this task. This way you might miss some of the neat OO features, but the resulting code will at least have the advantage of keeping data and related code together.
now, if the had had a self-interpreter...
I guess that would be eval() or not?