For it to mean anything at all you have to read and understand what every single line of the code does. Which of course means knowing what the compiler will do with that code. Which of course means you have to read and understand every line of code that went into your compiler. Which means that you need to read and understand every line of the code that was used to compile the code that made your compiler. Which means that you need....
There is a little loop there. You would need, to really really be certain, to go back to the point where the compiler was written in a langiuage other than what it compiles, then do the same for that language...until you have recursed this tree back to the very machine language that made the original assembler that the first binary was made from.
(you could shortcut that of course by just starting with the current compilers binary and taking it apart and understanding it completely - that may turn out to be less work given the number of iterations that current generation of binaries has been through)
Of course...thats all very very silly... who has actually read all of the code for all of the programs on their system? I never bother to read code unless there is a problem that I intend to find and fix...or something I want to add.
I like binaries...packages even. There are some groups I do, indeed trust... like the Debian Developers.
Hmmm the one thing that has always worried me about this is capacitence.
Ever made a cap? Ill tell you *I* was tempted by the Capacitance constant of water man... 81!!!! Even some of the best plastics only have a constant of what around 5 or 6?
Sure, the capacitence of two traces on a PCB is quite small... but add a dielectric with a constant that high and see what happens. It might be enough to make the capacitance between say... leads on a controller chip... become signifigant... and if you have a high frequency signal, then it could start to really suck, really fast.
Anyway... this is all theoretical... Has anyone actually tried this?
Will electrolosys happen in the water without salt contamination? If so, I might be worries about slow hydrogen buildup in the sealed case (and if the case isn't sealed, I would worry about contamination over time from dust particles)
-Steve
Re:Sounds wrong to me
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Because the GPL says you have to redistribute the source, modified or original, as source. You can do it as binary too, but you have to distribute the source to any person that you distribute a binary to that wants it. This obfustcated text is NOT source code... it is a preprocessed intermediate bytecode.
Now, the fact that this intermediate bytecode is legal C or whatever other language the original was written in doesn't make it source. It just means that that is the internal syntax of this intermediate stage. This is because the defining characteristic of source code is that it is human readable. It is what the developer wrote and would use to modify it himself. WHen you preprocess this in such a way that it is no longer suitable for human reading and maintaining, it ceases to be source...and ceases to meet the GPL source requirement.
I highly recomend that anyone who is going to talk about this actually READ the GPL
From the GPL:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
-Steve
Re:Dirty Pool! But also confusing.
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The GPL is a license that, when I apply it to my code, says that you may take my code, modify it (or not) and redistribute it. However it places the restriction that you MUST also distribute or offer to distribute the source code for anything you compile my code into.
This is why the GPL defines what source code is. And source code is HUMAN READABLE. Thast the point of source code. Code that has been preprocessed in some way, even if it is not a machine readable binary, is NOT source code unless it is in a human readable and inteligable language.
I do believe that this issue is specifically addressed in the GPL (along with a few other situations, which is why the GPL is so damned long).
This is definitly a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the GPL, and I urge the person who asked this question, or anyone else working for this corperation to blow the whistle on this project. It is a direct attempt to subvert the free software community.
Whats fascinating in this article is the different ideas of publishers and developers. The publishers talked very plainly and without elaboration on how making a copy is a violation of their copyright and they will persue it.
The actual writters of the games elaborated in ways that showed a definite lack of understanding of copyright law.
As Will Wright said:
Now even though the game may be off the market, by allowing everyone to freely download or even sell collections of old games, I might lose whatever copyright claims I have on the original character.
While this may be true with a trade mark, it is certainly not true under copyright (which is what covers these issues being discussed). He was not the first one in the artcile to express a view like that.
I find it fascinating that publishers know all they need to about copyright law, and the game makers are, by and large, ignorant of the real law and its issues. I have to wonder if this is true in other forms of publishing (like books) where the authors hold copyright more often and license their works to the publishers.
Well of course this brings up that "Windows" has more than one meaning. Win2000 is a very different beast than the consumer grade windows, its not really the same OS at all. Its mostly binary compatible, but it has its own boot loader and its own kernel architecture.
Honestly, I havn't personally used NT/2K much. I had a laptop with it installed (had - it got stolen) and it never Blue screened, it wokred fine. However, all I ever did was play diablo 2 on it.
Generally all of my "Windows" experience in the past 5 years has been seeing other peoples machines and what they do. Usually "consumer grade" Win98 or WinME or Win95 (the last computer I owned that I really used Windows on was a Win95 OSR2 machine)
It was almost a direct quote. His statement was that the adult children of alcoholics tend to have certain control issues.
He even related a story where his boss's son came in to work as an intern and one day he finnally got curious enough to ask and went to the son and said "Your grandfather wasn't by any chance an alcoholic", to which the kid answered yes.
Well the deep need to help others would be a reason to go into psychiatric work. Its many years of school and training.
He didn't go much into what these issues are, and I don't have much (knowing) experience with the adult children of alcoholics. However, I do know several people with other traumatic childhood backgrounds and they do, as a group, seem to have certain peculiarities that are hard to really pinpoint and list, but are definitly there well enough that I have gotten that intuitive twinge about a person weeks before they actually told me about their past.
So, what he meant by "control issues" im not sure... but management is an interesting style of job with very different stresses and requirements than that of the people being managed, so I would not doubt that there is a high correlation (if not a 1:1) with certain types of experiences and going into management. (id like to see it correlated with management styles too)
as I said, this was my friends experience. Maybe its just the people that he tends to end up getting close to and talking about stuff with (its not the sort of thing a person goes around telling everyone)
Again, right back to personality things... its been my experience that the people a person tends to attract tend to have certain similarities of character and experience.
However, just having known people of variou sbackgrounds, I wouldn't at all be surprized to see a disproportionate number of people with those experience in Rocky Casts (due to its subject matter)
My point was just that people do give off non-verbal clues about their past experiences often, and often people with similar major experiences seem to make similar life decisions.
So no...not trolling...just relating my experience to the joke someone made about PHBs and battered wives. As one o fthe amotivational posters says "Dysfunction: The common link in all your dysfunctional relationships is you". There is often more truth there than one wants to admit.
> Let's just leave BSODs out of it. Maybe an issue but not always. Some people can get > BSODs down to near nil and others can't but it is always the OS's fault. Hmmmm.
I find this intetresting because I have seen it too.
In my experience a well run Windows system by a person with real clue can last a while and be pretty blue screen free. The same is true for a system run by an idiot who got it all installed right and hardly does anything with the box, just plays some specific game or uses Word or something.
However, when you start installing software and doing different things, they gan get real flakey real fast. Not just in reliability either... users shit all over the box!
I saw someone turn on their computer...it came up... and the desktop was just littered with icons... full. They never manage their stuff, they just keep all that crap that every little software package installs.... is it just me or are companies that make Windows software extremely arrogent? id say MAYBE 1% of the software I use is something important enough that I want an icon for it on my desktop made special... but every peice of windows software seems to think its that special.
my little rant... the unmanageability is why I don't use it. I installed debian GNU/linux on this box 2.5 years ago, have installed software and iuninstalled it over and over... and it never gets unstable.
In a cluster, where software isn't being installed and uninstalled, windows will probably be just fine. Tho frankly, id rather a bunch of unix boxen with tools like cfengine to manage such things.
You know there may be more to that than you think.
At Arisia this year I sat in on a panel on "Writting Characters with Mental Disorders" the panelists were sci fi publishers who work with mental patients in some manner. One of the panelists said that his experience has been that EVERY person he has met that goes into management of psychiatric units have turned out to be adult children of alcoholics (with all the telltale control issues that are so common in such cases)
A friend of mine who was involved with the Rocky Horror Picture show casts (in a coupl eof casts for several years) has said he is yet to meet anyone in a Rocky cast that hadn't been previously molested as a child or raped.
Interesting patterns that people develop, don't you think?
That depends entirly on what blacklist we are talking about.
Our mail relay boxen were listed in orbs for a long time. We were never a major spam source, in fact, our relays were open (and stayed open because of political reasons, took us a while to get them shut down... now we have authenticated smtp and life is good)
The fact is, we got on the orbs list not because we were a spam source, but because we could have been. We were open if (and only if) you forged your from address as being from our domain. Yea...it was dumb - but believe it or not, noone spammed through us!
In fact (I said political process right?) we had permission to shut down relaying permanantly if we got abused - we were waiting for it! It never happened. (eventually, we finnally got it shut down without abuse but... it took time)
So no... bein glisted on a blacklist doesn't mean you are a spam source, unless it is one of the better blacklists. SOme blacklists will list you because you could be one. (One of the orbs tests that caught a machine of ours was an obscure uucp test that, yes meant we were open, but again.... no real spammers were actually using)
all in all I liked orbs, I think that active testing and notification was good... it helped us fix some of the stuff we didn't know about... but in the end, it wasn't a very good blacklist to block mail by because it listed alot of places that just wetren't spam sources (like us).
(Note: the following argument is based on an understanding of copyright issues based on research done prior to the DMCA, so this may be wrong as to current US law)
When I buy a copy of software, how do I need a license to USE it?
IF you sell me a book you wrote, I don't need to obtain a license to read it, or to highlight it, or to burn it, or to masturbate all over it.
So, once I own a copy, why should I need any sort of license from you to USE it?
The only restrictions placed by copyright law are onm copying. I can't make copies and resell them. There is some question on whether I can make personal copies just for me. In fact, Congress passed an ammendment to copyright law to explicitly state that this is allowed for Music just to settle an argument on this point between consumer groups and publishers. (the amendment being ambiguous itself and causing debate over whether I can give or lend a personal copy to a friend)
I think a major point of confusion here is people reading EULAs and other copyright notices and thinking they actually necissarily mean anything. This point was driven home to me when I saw a book with NO COPYRIGHT NOTICE, in fact, the author had been dead over 100 years - but the book still had the "legal warnings" telling me I can't copy the book without permission. (and yes, this was a very recent printing, within the last 10 years or so) A statement with exacly 0 legal force since the entirety of the book is in the public domain.
Again, the original analogy was a book (which is also covered by copyright law).
It is perfectly legal to sell an old book when you are done using it.
The difference between rental of video games and the case we are talking about is the media. In the case of rental, the rental company (blockbuster, west coast video etc) owns the media.
In fact it is the same... because the owner of the media (not the renter, but the rental company) doesn't hold copyright on the work, but they can resell the media when they no longer iwsh to keep it in their rental stock.
A lightning strike doesn't last very long, High Voltage, High current, very short time period. Secondly the Statue of liberty is HUGE.
If the body of a metal car can withstand a lightning strike, then the statue of liberty can. In fact, it does. Huge copper statue, largest building in the area (remember, its out on an island on the water) - it gets hit by lightning ALL THE TIME (well, all the time when there are electrical storms)
One doesn't need a PhD in electromagnetics for this.
Standing inside a big metal box or structure is the best place to be if lightning strikes. Well, or sitting, or laying down. You get the picture.
Its not because its a faraday cage though, its another reason.
When a static electric discharge happens, it charges the surface it hits, the outside surface. The inside surface is completely uneffected, all of the charge collects on the outside (think of it this way - thats where the charge can spread out most effectivly and evenly)
It will also rush or discharge to ground as soon as it can, which is probably immediatly in the case of a lightning strike.
I have seen a person inside a metal cage run their hand along the inside of the cage while the outside of the cage was getting struck by "lightning" from a Van De Graff (a BIG van de graff, a 3 story tall one thats sitting in the Boston Museam of Science).
Its for this reason (and not the common myth of "rubber tires" that inside your car is the safest place to be during a lighting storm...assuming your car isn't made of fiberglass that is).
Of course, whether this applies to lightning summoned forth by mutant powers, its hard to say. If these mutant powers can directly cause elettrons to flow one way or another and choose their path, then anything is possible.
Go to the local gun shop. Ask for some pyrodex for your muzzle loader. Ask for some fuse while your at it. They will want to see ID, and you will have to sign for it, sure. Big deal. Use fake ID... or buy it out in the sticks somewhere... sit on it for a year or two.
Couple of nice pipe bombs there. Grab a couple of propane canisters. Acetalene is nice too.
Just so many possibilities. Really.... being destructive isn't like, hard.
My only problem with simple bomb instructions is that like... its so easy to figure the simple stuff out that - if you can't figure out on you rown how to make a simpl epipe bomb, maybe you really shouldn't make one.
Actually...this is probably better done in userspace.
Send a signal to the proc causing it to dump core (means the proc can't trap at least one of those signals)
Then have another utility to turn the core dump into a new executable.
I have been told (by a much more expoerienced hacker than myself that such a utility is part of the emacs compile... it makes a small lisp interpreter, then starts sucking in lisp code... finishes... dumps core, then the core dump is turned into the emacs executable
Quite doable....if evil magic.
And a silly solution to this problem, since using it requires that you shut the program down in this very graceful manner. Its also not portable to new platforms, since it requires knowledge of internal OS and architecture stuff.
Much better to use log files (or "checkpoint" files to use a more pointed term) as those are a portable solution that still does the job if someone trips over the poer cord, or the machine otherwise dies before you can gracefully kill the process.
Ok... "freezing" a process before shutdown is a fine idea...actually... to be really really evil, you could say its been done... look at the emacs compile closely if you don't believe me. There is a utility in existance that will take a core dump and turn it into an executable! EVIL MAGIC I SAY!
However, it only solves part of the problem. You have to be able to tell the system to freeze the process before it goes down. What happens if some sysadmin inputs the wrong PID to a kill -9 ? or If someone trips over the power cord, or a kernel bug (or particularly nasty disk or disk subsystem lossage) brings the machine down hard BEFORE you can freeze your process?
Many possibilities in many scenarios.
End result: Log files work better - in fact - its what most all of the commercial software packages that do long runnoing computations (gaussian just to name one) use them.
IIRC UPS can indeed inspect any package that they want. As a private carrier there is no restriction on them fdoing that, and they have been known to do so on occasion.
Also IIRC, the USPS on the other hand needs a warrent to open a package.
Howevr I agree with you. Whether its illegal or not, its wrong for them to be doing this. You are paying for bandwith, and using it. As long as what your doing isn't bothering the community at large (like participating in DDOS or spamming) then they should just shut up and provide the bandwith.
hmmmm I don't see how one would equate free sofytware with natoonal...er I mean patriotism.
Free software is about promoting the rights of users and creating an open and free environment to work in.
Patriotism is about giving lip service to freedom while really just drumming up nationalist support for the current regeime, whether it is really promoting freedom or not.
The point here, as I see it, was to investigate something about human nature.
Is a human a "rational Investor" or is "Altruism" part of our very makeup? Do we value "justice" above personal gain?
This was tested by putting people in an artifical situation with certain rules and seeing how they chose....do they choose to do what maximizes personal gain, or will they take actions that reduce personal gain in the interest of an overall sense of fairness.
Within the context of the system of rules in question, the rational choice was obvious, not invest. (if this offends you and your sense of how the world works, call it "flume" instead of "invest), as that maximizes personal gain.
The reason Rand would be rolling over in her grave is not that the system didn't reward investing (afterall, if the current situation is one that doesn't favor investing then the "rational" person doesn't invest right?) but rather because it showed that peoples motives are not completely selfish.... that maximizing personal gain came second to more egalitarian motives.
Heh and of course... because its "beyond altruism" it must be the real reason. Why is it that whenever I see someone say something like that I immediatly think "Someone has been reading way too much Ayn Rand for their own good"?
Perhaps they just plain think its wrong for a company to be selling broken propretary versions of an open standard and passing it off as an authentic version of the open standard?
That whole "sense of justice" thing.
Then again...maybe it really is just so they can make another buck on hardware? Hard to say what their real motives are. However, we all have our own idea on what we would like them to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, that only gets you so far....
For it to mean anything at all you have to read and understand what every single line of the code does. Which of course means knowing what the compiler will do with that code. Which of course means you have to read and understand every line of code that went into your compiler. Which means that you need to read and understand every line of the code that was used to compile the code that made your compiler. Which means that you need....
There is a little loop there. You would need, to really really be certain, to go back to the point where the compiler was written in a langiuage other than what it compiles, then do the same for that language...until you have recursed this tree back to the very machine language that made the original assembler that the first binary was made from.
(you could shortcut that of course by just starting with the current compilers binary and taking it apart and understanding it completely - that may turn out to be less work given the number of iterations that current generation of binaries has been through)
Of course...thats all very very silly... who has actually read all of the code for all of the programs on their system? I never bother to read code unless there is a problem that I intend to find and fix...or something I want to add.
I like binaries...packages even. There are some groups I do, indeed trust... like the Debian Developers.
-Steve
Hmmm the one thing that has always worried me about this is capacitence.
Ever made a cap? Ill tell you *I* was tempted by the Capacitance constant of water man... 81!!!! Even some of the best plastics only have a constant of what around 5 or 6?
Sure, the capacitence of two traces on a PCB is quite small... but add a dielectric with a constant that high and see what happens. It might be enough to make the capacitance between say... leads on a controller chip... become signifigant... and if you have a high frequency signal, then it could start to really suck, really fast.
Anyway... this is all theoretical... Has anyone actually tried this?
Will electrolosys happen in the water without salt contamination? If so, I might be worries about slow hydrogen buildup in the sealed case (and if the case isn't sealed, I would worry about contamination over time from dust particles)
-Steve
Now, the fact that this intermediate bytecode is legal C or whatever other language the original was written in doesn't make it source. It just means that that is the internal syntax of this intermediate stage. This is because the defining characteristic of source code is that it is human readable. It is what the developer wrote and would use to modify it himself. WHen you preprocess this in such a way that it is no longer suitable for human reading and maintaining, it ceases to be source...and ceases to meet the GPL source requirement.
I highly recomend that anyone who is going to talk about this actually READ the GPL
From the GPL:
-Steve
The GPL is a license that, when I apply it to my code, says that you may take my code, modify it (or not) and redistribute it. However it places the restriction that you MUST also distribute or offer to distribute the source code for anything you compile my code into.
This is why the GPL defines what source code is. And source code is HUMAN READABLE. Thast the point of source code. Code that has been preprocessed in some way, even if it is not a machine readable binary, is NOT source code unless it is in a human readable and inteligable language.
I do believe that this issue is specifically addressed in the GPL (along with a few other situations, which is why the GPL is so damned long).
This is definitly a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the GPL, and I urge the person who asked this question, or anyone else working for this corperation to blow the whistle on this project. It is a direct attempt to subvert the free software community.
-Steve
The publishers talked very plainly and without elaboration on how making a copy is a violation of their copyright and they will persue it.
The actual writters of the games elaborated in ways that showed a definite lack of understanding of copyright law.
As Will Wright said:
While this may be true with a trade mark, it is certainly not true under copyright (which is what covers these issues being discussed). He was not the first one in the artcile to express a view like that.
I find it fascinating that publishers know all they need to about copyright law, and the game makers are, by and large, ignorant of the real law and its issues. I have to wonder if this is true in other forms of publishing (like books) where the authors hold copyright more often and license their works to the publishers.
-Steve
Well of course this brings up that "Windows" has more than one meaning. Win2000 is a very different beast than the consumer grade windows, its not really the same OS at all. Its mostly binary compatible, but it has its own boot loader and its own kernel architecture.
Honestly, I havn't personally used NT/2K much. I had a laptop with it installed (had - it got stolen) and it never Blue screened, it wokred fine. However, all I ever did was play diablo 2 on it.
Generally all of my "Windows" experience in the past 5 years has been seeing other peoples machines and what they do. Usually "consumer grade" Win98 or WinME or Win95 (the last computer I owned that I really used Windows on was a Win95 OSR2 machine)
-Steve
It was almost a direct quote. His statement was that the adult children of alcoholics tend to have certain control issues.
He even related a story where his boss's son came in to work as an intern and one day he finnally got curious enough to ask and went to the son and said "Your grandfather wasn't by any chance an alcoholic", to which the kid answered yes.
Well the deep need to help others would be a reason to go into psychiatric work. Its many years of school and training.
He didn't go much into what these issues are, and I don't have much (knowing) experience with the adult children of alcoholics. However, I do know several people with other traumatic childhood backgrounds and they do, as a group, seem to have certain peculiarities that are hard to really pinpoint and list, but are definitly there well enough that I have gotten that intuitive twinge about a person weeks before they actually told me about their past.
So, what he meant by "control issues" im not sure... but management is an interesting style of job with very different stresses and requirements than that of the people being managed, so I would not doubt that there is a high correlation (if not a 1:1) with certain types of experiences and going into management.
(id like to see it correlated with management styles too)
-Steve
Not trolling... thats a good data point...
as I said, this was my friends experience. Maybe its just the people that he tends to end up getting close to and talking about stuff with (its not the sort of thing a person goes around telling everyone)
Again, right back to personality things... its been my experience that the people a person tends to attract tend to have certain similarities of character and experience.
However, just having known people of variou sbackgrounds, I wouldn't at all be surprized to see a disproportionate number of people with those experience in Rocky Casts (due to its subject matter)
My point was just that people do give off non-verbal clues about their past experiences often, and often people with similar major experiences seem to make similar life
decisions.
So no...not trolling...just relating my experience to the joke someone made about PHBs and battered wives. As one o fthe amotivational posters says "Dysfunction: The common link in all your dysfunctional relationships is you". There is often more truth there than one wants to admit.
-Steve
> Let's just leave BSODs out of it. Maybe an issue but not always. Some people can get
> BSODs down to near nil and others can't but it is always the OS's fault. Hmmmm.
I find this intetresting because I have seen it too.
In my experience a well run Windows system by a person with real clue can last a while and be pretty blue screen free. The same is true for a system run by an idiot who got it all installed right and hardly does anything with the box, just plays some specific game or uses Word or something.
However, when you start installing software and doing different things, they gan get real flakey real fast. Not just in reliability either... users shit all over the box!
I saw someone turn on their computer...it came up... and the desktop was just littered with icons... full. They never manage their stuff, they just keep all that crap that every little software package installs.... is it just me or are companies that make Windows software extremely arrogent? id say MAYBE 1% of the software I use is something important enough that I want an icon for it on my desktop made special... but every peice of windows software seems to think its that special.
my little rant... the unmanageability is why I don't use it. I installed debian GNU/linux on this box 2.5 years ago, have installed software and iuninstalled it over and over... and it never gets unstable.
In a cluster, where software isn't being installed and uninstalled, windows will probably be just fine. Tho frankly, id rather a bunch of unix boxen with tools like cfengine to manage such things.
-Steve
> Ahhh well, PHBs are like abused wifes I guess.
You know there may be more to that than you think.
At Arisia this year I sat in on a panel on "Writting Characters with Mental Disorders" the panelists were sci fi publishers who work with mental patients in some manner. One of the panelists said that his experience has been that EVERY person he has met that goes into management of psychiatric units have turned out to be adult children of alcoholics (with all the telltale control issues that are so common in such cases)
A friend of mine who was involved with the Rocky Horror Picture show casts (in a coupl eof casts for several years) has said he is yet to meet anyone in a Rocky cast that hadn't been previously molested as a child or raped.
Interesting patterns that people develop, don't you think?
-Steve
Actually... Chimps are a hell of alot more expensive.
You have to pay someone to clean the cage, and that person alone is going to get paid more than any CS student, probably more than 2 of them.
Never mind that chimps demand a much higher standard of living than students do.
-Steve
That depends entirly on what blacklist we are talking about.
Our mail relay boxen were listed in orbs for a long time. We were never a major spam source, in fact, our relays were open (and stayed open because of political reasons, took us a while to get them shut down... now we have authenticated smtp and life is good)
The fact is, we got on the orbs list not because we were a spam source, but because we could have been. We were open if (and only if) you forged your from address as being from our domain. Yea...it was dumb - but believe it or not, noone spammed through us!
In fact (I said political process right?) we had permission to shut down relaying permanantly if we got abused - we were waiting for it! It never happened. (eventually, we finnally got it shut down without abuse but... it took time)
So no... bein glisted on a blacklist doesn't mean you are a spam source, unless it is one of the better blacklists. SOme blacklists will list you because you could be one. (One of the orbs tests that caught a machine of ours was an obscure uucp test that, yes meant we were open, but again.... no real spammers were actually using)
all in all I liked orbs, I think that active testing and notification was good... it helped us fix some of the stuff we didn't know about... but in the end, it wasn't a very good blacklist to block mail by because it listed alot of places that just wetren't spam sources (like us).
-Steve
(Note: the following argument is based on an understanding of copyright issues based on research done prior to the DMCA, so this may be wrong as to current US law)
When I buy a copy of software, how do I need a license to USE it?
IF you sell me a book you wrote, I don't need to obtain a license to read it, or to highlight it, or to burn it, or to masturbate all over it.
So, once I own a copy, why should I need any sort of license from you to USE it?
The only restrictions placed by copyright law are onm copying. I can't make copies and resell them. There is some question on whether I can make personal copies just for me. In fact, Congress passed an ammendment to copyright law to explicitly state that this is allowed for Music just to settle an argument on this point between consumer groups and publishers. (the amendment being ambiguous itself and causing debate over whether I can give or lend a personal copy to a friend)
I think a major point of confusion here is people reading EULAs and other copyright notices and thinking they actually necissarily mean anything. This point was driven home to me when I saw a book with NO COPYRIGHT NOTICE, in fact, the author had been dead over 100 years - but the book still had the "legal warnings" telling me I can't copy the book without permission. (and yes, this was a very recent printing, within the last 10 years or so) A statement with exacly 0 legal force since the entirety of the book is in the public domain.
-Steve
So affix it to a peice of paper, and tape it inside the case.
Then simply use new tape next time.
Problem solved.
-Steve
However, you DO own the media that it is on.
Again, the original analogy was a book (which is also covered by copyright law).
It is perfectly legal to sell an old book when you are done using it.
The difference between rental of video games and the case we are talking about is the media. In the case of rental, the rental company (blockbuster, west coast video etc) owns the media.
In fact it is the same... because the owner of the media (not the renter, but the rental company) doesn't hold copyright on the work, but they can resell the media when they no longer iwsh to keep it in their rental stock.
-Steve
Lots of molten copper?
A lightning strike doesn't last very long, High Voltage, High current, very short time period. Secondly the Statue of liberty is HUGE.
If the body of a metal car can withstand a lightning strike, then the statue of liberty can. In fact, it does. Huge copper statue, largest building in the area (remember, its out on an island on the water) - it gets hit by lightning ALL THE TIME (well, all the time when there are electrical storms)
-Steve
One doesn't need a PhD in electromagnetics for this.
Standing inside a big metal box or structure is the best place to be if lightning strikes. Well, or sitting, or laying down. You get the picture.
Its not because its a faraday cage though, its another reason.
When a static electric discharge happens, it charges the surface it hits, the outside surface. The inside surface is completely uneffected, all of the charge collects on the outside (think of it this way - thats where the charge can spread out most effectivly and evenly)
It will also rush or discharge to ground as soon as it can, which is probably immediatly in the case of a lightning strike.
I have seen a person inside a metal cage run their hand along the inside of the cage while the outside of the cage was getting struck by "lightning" from a Van De Graff (a BIG van de graff, a 3 story tall one thats sitting in the Boston Museam of Science).
Its for this reason (and not the common myth of "rubber tires" that inside your car is the safest place to be during a lighting storm...assuming your car isn't made of fiberglass that is).
Of course, whether this applies to lightning summoned forth by mutant powers, its hard to say. If these mutant powers can directly cause elettrons to flow one way or another and choose their path, then anything is possible.
-Steve
hmmmm overly complicated....
Go to the local gun shop. Ask for some pyrodex for your muzzle loader. Ask for some fuse while your at it. They will want to see ID, and you will have to sign for it, sure. Big deal. Use fake ID... or buy it out in the sticks somewhere... sit on it for a year or two.
Couple of nice pipe bombs there. Grab a couple of propane canisters. Acetalene is nice too.
Just so many possibilities. Really.... being destructive isn't like, hard.
My only problem with simple bomb instructions is that like... its so easy to figure the simple stuff out that - if you can't figure out on you rown how to make a simpl epipe bomb, maybe you really shouldn't make one.
-Steve
I want it...I must have these implants. I must have them for one reason and one reason only... the most important reason of all!
So I can say
"It is by will alone that I set my cursor in motion"
-Steve
Actually...this is probably better done in userspace.
Send a signal to the proc causing it to dump core (means the proc can't trap at least one of those signals)
Then have another utility to turn the core dump into a new executable.
I have been told (by a much more expoerienced hacker than myself that such a utility is part of the emacs compile... it makes a small lisp interpreter, then starts sucking in lisp code... finishes... dumps core, then the core dump is turned into the emacs executable
Quite doable....if evil magic.
And a silly solution to this problem, since using it requires that you shut the program down in this very graceful manner. Its also not portable to new platforms, since it requires knowledge of internal OS and architecture stuff.
Much better to use log files (or "checkpoint" files to use a more pointed term) as those are a portable solution that still does the job if someone trips over the poer cord, or the machine otherwise dies before you can gracefully kill the process.
-Steve
How about because its a better solution?
Ok... "freezing" a process before shutdown is a fine idea...actually... to be really really evil, you could say its been done... look at the emacs compile closely if you don't believe me. There is a utility in existance that will take a core dump and turn it into an executable! EVIL MAGIC I SAY!
However, it only solves part of the problem. You have to be able to tell the system to freeze the process before it goes down. What happens if some sysadmin inputs the wrong PID to a kill -9 ? or If someone trips over the power cord, or a kernel bug (or particularly nasty disk or disk subsystem lossage) brings the machine down hard BEFORE you can freeze your process?
Many possibilities in many scenarios.
End result: Log files work better - in fact - its what most all of the commercial software packages that do long runnoing computations (gaussian just to name one) use them.
-Steve
IIRC UPS can indeed inspect any package that they want. As a private carrier there is no restriction on them fdoing that, and they have been known to do so on occasion.
Also IIRC, the USPS on the other hand needs a warrent to open a package.
Howevr I agree with you. Whether its illegal or not, its wrong for them to be doing this. You are paying for bandwith, and using it. As long as what your doing isn't bothering the community at large (like participating in DDOS or spamming) then they should just shut up and provide the bandwith.
-Steve
hmmmm I don't see how one would equate free sofytware with natoonal...er I mean patriotism.
Free software is about promoting the rights of users and creating an open and free environment to work in.
Patriotism is about giving lip service to freedom while really just drumming up nationalist support for the current regeime, whether it is really promoting freedom or not.
The two don't seem very compatible.
-Steve
Yet of course, that wasn't the point.
The point here, as I see it, was to investigate something about human nature.
Is a human a "rational Investor" or is "Altruism" part of our very makeup? Do we value "justice" above personal gain?
This was tested by putting people in an artifical situation with certain rules and seeing how they chose....do they choose to do what maximizes personal gain, or will they take actions that reduce personal gain in the interest of an overall sense of fairness.
Within the context of the system of rules in question, the rational choice was obvious, not invest. (if this offends you and your sense of how the world works, call it "flume" instead of "invest), as that maximizes personal gain.
The reason Rand would be rolling over in her grave is not that the system didn't reward investing (afterall, if the current situation is one that doesn't favor investing then the "rational" person doesn't invest right?) but rather because it showed that peoples motives are not completely selfish.... that maximizing personal gain came second to more egalitarian motives.
-Steve
Heh and of course... because its "beyond altruism" it must be the real reason. Why is it that whenever I see someone say something like that I immediatly think "Someone has been reading way too much Ayn Rand for their own good"?
Perhaps they just plain think its wrong for a company to be selling broken propretary versions of an open standard and passing it off as an authentic version of the open standard?
That whole "sense of justice" thing.
Then again...maybe it really is just so they can make another buck on hardware? Hard to say what their real motives are. However, we all have our own idea on what we would like them to be.
-Steve