Set styles to use some random font, write the document, implement the styles using the GPL fonts then release the result as GPL. Release the 'source' document with stylesheets that use other fonts. The tell people to LGPL their fonts rather than GPL them: this ought to fix the problem.
I am writing up a PhD in pure mathematics and mathematical logic (group theory and PA). I know very well about how incomprehensible and long proofs can get. I've also had the pleasure of having to attack long papers in unrelated areas, and appreciate how ugly it can seem when you need to understand the result to help you with your research.
Behind the proof of FLT lies a few very clever thoughts. The rest is either reuse of other concepts or mathematical language added so as to effectively communicate those thoughts: paper referees are partly there to help with this, and I recall that the FLT paper needed a few to facilitate its effective communication.
You may of course choose not to see things the way I do, my points of view came about during my postgrad study. And I still think that the best proofs are the short ones: long proofs are the necessary alternative.
I happily accept spam into my Thunderbird Junk folder, so as to provide the filter with more examples of SPAM. A quick 'select all Junk' and look for any non-junk suffices before moving the sample junk messages to my Junk folder. If I'm short of space, then I may delete some. Certainly I'll never read it, but yes I am more accepting of spam, as most probably are many others. In short, rejecting spam didn't work, so people have found other ways around the problem. But it is still a problem.
Just got a mac mini, got a PC running linux with built in ethernet. What's the simplest way to get the two talking? Is a crossover cable enough? Anybody know anything about this?
Short, sweet, beautiful proofs of interesting and useful theorems, I would welcome them to do so with open arms.
As a tool to produce vast quantities of precise logical porridge quickly, computers have no equal in today's world, yet that is not what real mathematical proofs should be about.
Mathematical proofs should show short, clever ways of connecting otherwise disparate concepts that are only obvious in hindsight. This is where computers will always be weaker.
On the other hand, EA are not yet receiving the money that they could make by suing the authors of the privateer remake. So in this case, they are 'losing money'.
Personally I don't like that sort of accounting, but it's what seems to go on these days.
Bad science is commonplace, good science is an art form. (Consider e.g. the beauty of general relativity or complex analysis vs. the junk science to satisfy a papers per year quota that you often get.)
The same is true of code. Good code is an art form. Bad code is commonplace. And as the exception that proves the rule, very very bad code is, alas, also an art form.
(n.b. by art here, I guess I mean the production of some kind of work with intrinsic beauty, whatever that means...)
Teh thnig abot bda spleling on wikipedia is that it can easily be corrected. If I'm not too pressed for time and I see an obvious typo or grammatical error, I can correct it. This is a good thing for wkipedia for many reasons.
Why Mersenne primes are entirely composed of 1's: A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2^n-1. A number of the form 2^n will look in binary like 100...00 with n zeros (just as 10^n has n zeros when written to base 10.) Subtract 1, and you obviously get 011...11 with n ones, and of course we ignore the leading zero.
Why not transmit the length? This just means transmitting n rather than 2^n. No reason I can see why not.
Phil is, of course, descended from Queen Vic and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha, as, of course, is his wife Liz II. (IIRC Liz and Phil are 3rd cousins.)
This sort of thing can become a big deal if you're incorporating code from a large number of different places. If I draw on 5 projects with copyright clauses like this, then I have to include 6 copyright clauses in my code. If 4 other people do likewise, they must do the same. Now if someone else writes a program incorporating code from the work of all five of us, how many copyright notices must he include in the documentation? The problem of requring messages to be included causes a proliferation of such messages when people keep borrowing code from each other.
It's not so much about bringing other code under GPL as preventing GPL code being distributed under a different license. Without that sort of clause, as happens with BSD code, I can copy the code add a bit of my own, and then redistribute the whole under a proprietary license. That is against the idea that the FSF and the GPL were created to pioneer, hence the need for such conditions.
This illustrates a common fallacy, best answered by analogy to something like drilling for oil: just because a company invests millions of dollars sinking a well, and thousands of man-hours spending those dollars sinking said well, the company has NO right to actually strike oil. Similarly, if you bust a gut training to be good a tennis, you have no right (moral, legal or otherwise) to expect Roger Federer to simply roll over for you when you meet him in the US Open.
If you spend x hours, and value your time at $y/hr, all you have a simple piece of arithmetic: $xy. You have no right, unless something is agreed in writing with someone who will pay you $xy, to actually receive the money.
Effort spent does not automatically qualify you for a reward, no matter how much effort spent or how much you think you have achieved with that effort.
I'll now reply piecemeal. So if I spend ten years of my life, 80 hours a week, dedicated to building The Killer App of the 21st Century, knowing that millions of people will want what I create and voluntarily give me compensation that makes it worth my while...? If it's the compensation that makes it worth your while, then you're doing it for the money, which makes it unlikely that you'll produce the best possible Killer App for whatever task it is meant to perform. The best is rarely achieved by someone doing it mainly for the money. As to the 'knowing that' business, you need to have some agreement that you will get this compensation and that requires at least a written contract with someone.
And then all those millions of people just steal* my creation from me (they want it; they can afford it; they have just learned they don't have to pay), I haven't been deprived of anything**? What planet are you from? Another fallacy, one which big software companies like to peddle, is the analogy with stealing. For various reasons I won't elaborate on here, the analogy has serious problems. That your copyright has been violated gives you something legal to play with, but the moral issues are never so clear cut as to be able to answer them given the description in your posting. Writing software professionally is like fishing, and if the fish figure out how to get the bait without biting the hook, that's just your bad luck.
Why is hammering a nail worth getting paid for, but building complex systems that entertain people or save them millions of dollars not worth anything? You don't hammer a nail first, then try to charge for it afterwards. You get an agreement that someone will pay you for hammering the nail, then you hammer it. In the software world, this is writing something to order, not writing something and trying to sell it.
Oh sure, you're going to say that supporting those complex systems are where we should make our money. No, just that if you're so worried about who will pay, you should sort it out before investing x years writing the software, rather than the speculative approach of write first, sell later. Obviously the latter is easier to do, but you trade this off against guarantees of payment. Your choice which way (though there is no inalienable right to enjoy the best of both worlds.)
What a stupid idea. Not only is it stupid because it's an indirect, roundabout way of making money, it's also stupid because you've still eliminated the incentive to create; The best solutions to problems, greatest works of art and science, weren't done for the money. The incentive there was something else.
the support companies will compete to create as little as possible, because that would incur a cost and put them at a disadvantage over time. Everybody who's in the business, doing it for the money, will compete to create as little as possible, so as to guarantee the maximum possibility for improvements and upgrades that they can charge for. Witness the fact that M$, with all it's money and programming muscle, can't be bothered to get anything righter
It's not freedom to own property that annoys me. It is all this creative redefining of the notion of property that annoys me. (Basically, if you can take something abstract, declare it your own and sell it, then you get money for nothing. Much effort is expended in pursuit of this goal.)
Intellectual property wasn't even 'property' in any sense of the word just a few decades ago. (It was, and strictly is, a bunch of legal rights, created by politicians who have long since been voted out of office, that are legally transferrable from one legal entity to another. These rights were created subtractively by first taking away and then giving a little back (removing the ability to legally copy a book from the citizens of a country, then creating legal structures by which permission to copy could be given back where it was necessary.)) Patents introduced a similar system of denying the general populous the legal right to make certain devices, then allowing said permission to be sold and controlled by some designated legal entity.
I'm sorry if that's a little complicated. I know it makes all this 'property' look a little artificial, but that's because it is artificial. People need to remember that. Except in legal terms, there are no moral rights not to be copied. All these systems of rights are legal constructs created with the intent of getting more done with them in place than would get done without them. That is the benchmark against which they should be tested and re-tested, and taking a 'moral stance' with respect to 'intellectual property', especially viewing intellectual property as property per se, is an erroneous position to take.
Red Hat are responsible for the Linux kernels that they distribute and no others. The Microsoft person argues that since there is no one body that takes responsibility for all Linux kernels, then there is nobody that takes reponsiblity for Linux and thus itself is unreliable. This is a strawman argument: the supplier of your Linux distro takes responsibliity and you should use a distro from a supplier that you trust. The supplier will take responsibility for this distro that you buy from them, but obviously not for any other distro that you may obtain by other means. Microsoft tries to assert that no such suppliers exist.
Also, only Microsoft takes responsiblity for security on Windows, and clearly they shirk those responsibilities and are untrustworthy when it comes to security. This nobody worth trusting takes responsiblity for windows.
To do on MacOS X what you do on Linux, you have to go through basically the same 'UNIX learning curve' -- while you can find your way round the GUI and graphical applications more easily, this is not enough to master the scripting, programming and related things that make UNIX powerful. It takes a similar amound of time to master these things on either platform, and once learned, such skills are easily transferable.
In short, the UNIX bit of MacOS X has basically the same learning curve as the 'UNIX' bit of Linux.
If you refer to the GUIs only, then I'd agree with you -- MacOS's GUI is more powerful, and easier to learn. Both of these come from it being better designed all the way through.
That said, if two things are both 'well designed' solutions for a given problem, then the more powerful one will almost certainly have a steeper learning curve.
Yes. Require (as is usual anyway) web access to be done via a company proxy-cache, and don't configure M$IE to use the cache (basically, have the internet router block ports in an appropriate way.)
You could also do a quick hack to rename Internet Explorer to Intranet Explorer just to emphasise this. (Basically, you should consider using IE to access untrusted sites on the internet as unhygenic.)
I've used Opera (with ads) and then Firefox for a while, and thus have never even needed to learn much about removing spyware. (Which makes it hard to advise others who have already caught spyware.)
It is quite possible to win the war having never won a battle. One side may win every battle, but be forced to concede defeat due to unforseen circumstances (vacuously, this may happen in the case where no overt battles are actually fought, as in the cold war.) [For more details, see Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War']
Arrange the subroutines and coroutines in nontrivial ways with subtle dependencies that can easily be detected through reverse engineering (chasing the flow control graphs of an executable and looking for tell tale watermark patterns.) This would require a closed source knock off to do a lot of rewriting (and if they have the expertise and time to do this, they have more than enough time to write their own 'good enough' implementation from scratch.)
How exactly one does this would the a fruitful research subject for the open source community.
(I recall something similar being done with instruction selection in a86 so that the author could detect commercial binaries produced by unregistered copies of a86.)
Slashdot Mirror
used to just license their alpha software as production releases? I guess it's a good thing they've finally got to the beta state ;-)
Set styles to use some random font, write the document, implement the styles using the GPL fonts then release the result as GPL. Release the 'source' document with stylesheets that use other fonts. The tell people to LGPL their fonts rather than GPL them: this ought to fix the problem.
Thanks. I've not done PC to PC networking without hubs in years, let alone PC to mac. Just wanted to avoid the learning by spending approach.
I am writing up a PhD in pure mathematics and mathematical logic (group theory and PA). I know very well about how incomprehensible and long proofs can get. I've also had the pleasure of having to attack long papers in unrelated areas, and appreciate how ugly it can seem when you need to understand the result to help you with your research.
Behind the proof of FLT lies a few very clever thoughts. The rest is either reuse of other concepts or mathematical language added so as to effectively communicate those thoughts: paper referees are partly there to help with this, and I recall that the FLT paper needed a few to facilitate its effective communication.
You may of course choose not to see things the way I do, my points of view came about during my postgrad study. And I still think that the best proofs are the short ones: long proofs are the necessary alternative.
I happily accept spam into my Thunderbird Junk folder, so as to provide the filter with more examples of SPAM. A quick 'select all Junk' and look for any non-junk suffices before moving the sample junk messages to my Junk folder. If I'm short of space, then I may delete some. Certainly I'll never read it, but yes I am more accepting of spam, as most probably are many others. In short, rejecting spam didn't work, so people have found other ways around the problem. But it is still a problem.
Just got a mac mini, got a PC running linux with built in ethernet. What's the simplest way to get the two talking? Is a crossover cable enough? Anybody know anything about this?
Short, sweet, beautiful proofs of interesting and useful theorems, I would welcome them to do so with open arms.
As a tool to produce vast quantities of precise logical porridge quickly, computers have no equal in today's world, yet that is not what real mathematical proofs should be about.
Mathematical proofs should show short, clever ways of connecting otherwise disparate concepts that are only obvious in hindsight. This is where computers will always be weaker.
On the other hand, EA are not yet receiving the money that they could make by suing the authors of the privateer remake. So in this case, they are 'losing money'.
Personally I don't like that sort of accounting, but it's what seems to go on these days.
Ok, so iDownload isn't 'spyware'. Let's have a vote as to what it is:
Bad science is commonplace, good science is an art form. (Consider e.g. the beauty of general relativity or complex analysis vs. the junk science to satisfy a papers per year quota that you often get.)
The same is true of code. Good code is an art form. Bad code is commonplace. And as the exception that proves the rule, very very bad code is, alas, also an art form.
(n.b. by art here, I guess I mean the production of some kind of work with intrinsic beauty, whatever that means...)
Teh thnig abot bda spleling on wikipedia is that it can easily be corrected. If I'm not too pressed for time and I see an obvious typo or grammatical error, I can correct it. This is a good thing for wkipedia for many reasons.
Why Mersenne primes are entirely composed of 1's: A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2^n-1. A number of the form 2^n will look in binary like 100...00 with n zeros (just as 10^n has n zeros when written to base 10.) Subtract 1, and you obviously get 011...11 with n ones, and of course we ignore the leading zero.
Why not transmit the length? This just means transmitting n rather than 2^n. No reason I can see why not.
This reminds me of the old fix for the Dir II virus. The fix was: zip up all the files on your hard disk, boot from a clean floppy and unzip them all.
Phil is, of course, descended from Queen Vic and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha, as, of course, is his wife Liz II. (IIRC Liz and Phil are 3rd cousins.)
This sort of thing can become a big deal if you're incorporating code from a large number of different places. If I draw on 5 projects with copyright clauses like this, then I have to include 6 copyright clauses in my code. If 4 other people do likewise, they must do the same. Now if someone else writes a program incorporating code from the work of all five of us, how many copyright notices must he include in the documentation? The problem of requring messages to be included causes a proliferation of such messages when people keep borrowing code from each other.
It's not so much about bringing other code under GPL as preventing GPL code being distributed under a different license. Without that sort of clause, as happens with BSD code, I can copy the code add a bit of my own, and then redistribute the whole under a proprietary license. That is against the idea that the FSF and the GPL were created to pioneer, hence the need for such conditions.
It's that old saying about eggs and baskets that I can't quite remember.
That, or the old one about horses and courses, or the 'to each his own' one, or maybe another one.
The mozilla developers don't take the mistaken assumption that there is one niche for a web browser and one way to do it right.
That said, they're gravitating from mozilla towards firefox+thunderbird+etc as the newer model for the mozilla suites of the future.
This illustrates a common fallacy, best answered by analogy to something like drilling for oil: just because a company invests millions of dollars sinking a well, and thousands of man-hours spending those dollars sinking said well, the company has NO right to actually strike oil. Similarly, if you bust a gut training to be good a tennis, you have no right (moral, legal or otherwise) to expect Roger Federer to simply roll over for you when you meet him in the US Open.
If you spend x hours, and value your time at $y/hr, all you have a simple piece of arithmetic: $xy. You have no right, unless something is agreed in writing with someone who will pay you $xy, to actually receive the money.
Effort spent does not automatically qualify you for a reward, no matter how much effort spent or how much you think you have achieved with that effort.
I'll now reply piecemeal.
So if I spend ten years of my life, 80 hours a week, dedicated to building The Killer App of the 21st Century, knowing that millions of people will want what I create and voluntarily give me compensation that makes it worth my while...?
If it's the compensation that makes it worth your while, then you're doing it for the money, which makes it unlikely that you'll produce the best possible Killer App for whatever task it is meant to perform. The best is rarely achieved by someone doing it mainly for the money. As to the 'knowing that' business, you need to have some agreement that you will get this compensation and that requires at least a written contract with someone.
And then all those millions of people just steal* my creation from me (they want it; they can afford it; they have just learned they don't have to pay), I haven't been deprived of anything**? What planet are you from?
Another fallacy, one which big software companies like to peddle, is the analogy with stealing. For various reasons I won't elaborate on here, the analogy has serious problems. That your copyright has been violated gives you something legal to play with, but the moral issues are never so clear cut as to be able to answer them given the description in your posting. Writing software professionally is like fishing, and if the fish figure out how to get the bait without biting the hook, that's just your bad luck.
Why is hammering a nail worth getting paid for, but building complex systems that entertain people or save them millions of dollars not worth anything?
You don't hammer a nail first, then try to charge for it afterwards. You get an agreement that someone will pay you for hammering the nail, then you hammer it. In the software world, this is writing something to order, not writing something and trying to sell it.
Oh sure, you're going to say that supporting those complex systems are where we should make our money.
No, just that if you're so worried about who will pay, you should sort it out before investing x years writing the software, rather than the speculative approach of write first, sell later. Obviously the latter is easier to do, but you trade this off against guarantees of payment. Your choice which way (though there is no inalienable right to enjoy the best of both worlds.)
What a stupid idea. Not only is it stupid because it's an indirect, roundabout way of making money, it's also stupid because you've still eliminated the incentive to create;
The best solutions to problems, greatest works of art and science, weren't done for the money. The incentive there was something else.
the support companies will compete to create as little as possible, because that would incur a cost and put them at a disadvantage over time.
Everybody who's in the business, doing it for the money, will compete to create as little as possible, so as to guarantee the maximum possibility for improvements and upgrades that they can charge for. Witness the fact that M$, with all it's money and programming muscle, can't be bothered to get anything righter
It's not freedom to own property that annoys me. It is all this creative redefining of the notion of property that annoys me. (Basically, if you can take something abstract, declare it your own and sell it, then you get money for nothing. Much effort is expended in pursuit of this goal.)
Intellectual property wasn't even 'property' in any sense of the word just a few decades ago. (It was, and strictly is, a bunch of legal rights, created by politicians who have long since been voted out of office, that are legally transferrable from one legal entity to another. These rights were created subtractively by first taking away and then giving a little back (removing the ability to legally copy a book from the citizens of a country, then creating legal structures by which permission to copy could be given back where it was necessary.)) Patents introduced a similar system of denying the general populous the legal right to make certain devices, then allowing said permission to be sold and controlled by some designated legal entity.
I'm sorry if that's a little complicated. I know it makes all this 'property' look a little artificial, but that's because it is artificial. People need to remember that. Except in legal terms, there are no moral rights not to be copied. All these systems of rights are legal constructs created with the intent of getting more done with them in place than would get done without them. That is the benchmark against which they should be tested and re-tested, and taking a 'moral stance' with respect to 'intellectual property', especially viewing intellectual property as property per se, is an erroneous position to take.
Rant over.
Red Hat are responsible for the Linux kernels that they distribute and no others. The Microsoft person argues that since there is no one body that takes responsibility for all Linux kernels, then there is nobody that takes reponsiblity for Linux and thus itself is unreliable. This is a strawman argument: the supplier of your Linux distro takes responsibliity and you should use a distro from a supplier that you trust. The supplier will take responsibility for this distro that you buy from them, but obviously not for any other distro that you may obtain by other means. Microsoft tries to assert that no such suppliers exist.
Also, only Microsoft takes responsiblity for security on Windows, and clearly they shirk those responsibilities and are untrustworthy when it comes to security. This nobody worth trusting takes responsiblity for windows.
To do on MacOS X what you do on Linux, you have to go through basically the same 'UNIX learning curve' -- while you can find your way round the GUI and graphical applications more easily, this is not enough to master the scripting, programming and related things that make UNIX powerful. It takes a similar amound of time to master these things on either platform, and once learned, such skills are easily transferable.
In short, the UNIX bit of MacOS X has basically the same learning curve as the 'UNIX' bit of Linux.
If you refer to the GUIs only, then I'd agree with you -- MacOS's GUI is more powerful, and easier to learn. Both of these come from it being better designed all the way through.
That said, if two things are both 'well designed' solutions for a given problem, then the more powerful one will almost certainly have a steeper learning curve.
Yes. Require (as is usual anyway) web access to be done via a company proxy-cache, and don't configure M$IE to use the cache (basically, have the internet router block ports in an appropriate way.)
You could also do a quick hack to rename Internet Explorer to Intranet Explorer just to emphasise this. (Basically, you should consider using IE to access untrusted sites on the internet as unhygenic.)
I've used Opera (with ads) and then Firefox for a while, and thus have never even needed to learn much about removing spyware. (Which makes it hard to advise others who have already caught spyware.)
It is quite possible to win the war having never won a battle. One side may win every battle, but be forced to concede defeat due to unforseen circumstances (vacuously, this may happen in the case where no overt battles are actually fought, as in the cold war.) [For more details, see Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War']
Arrange the subroutines and coroutines in nontrivial ways with subtle dependencies that can easily be detected through reverse engineering (chasing the flow control graphs of an executable and looking for tell tale watermark patterns.) This would require a closed source knock off to do a lot of rewriting (and if they have the expertise and time to do this, they have more than enough time to write their own 'good enough' implementation from scratch.)
How exactly one does this would the a fruitful research subject for the open source community.
(I recall something similar being done with instruction selection in a86 so that the author could detect commercial binaries produced by unregistered copies of a86.)
A monoculture is heavily structured on fixed rules.
These rules may be used to the detriment of said monoculture. (In mathematics, the concept applied here is called diagonalisation.)
The complexity issues in working around any flaw in the basic programming of the system, no matter how minor, will quickly balloon out of control.
The only way to properly address these issues is to work from scratch, being very careful not to make wrong moves that cannot easily be undone.