In Australia, for god knows how many years (1971-83 with a brief hiatus in '78, thanks google http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/H/htmlH/heyheyit s/heyheyits.htm) there was a live (and _oh_ yes it was live) TV show that was from than venerable classification "variety". Called "Hey Hey It's Saturday" it eventually capitulated to it's adult following and went to an evening timslot and then died the horrible death of a show without ideas. But when it was on in the mornings, from 8am to 11am, preceded by an hour of cartoons, which in turn was preceded by "The Thunderbirds" on and endless cycle of reruns, it was a truly bizarre combination of a guy behind a desk, an ostrich puppet (don't ask) and a female offsider for comedy value. Hard to describe really, but the point was that it did some cartoons, severe double entendre, comedy, sketches, popular music and competitions. Basically it was the show's cast having a party and we were invited to watch and participate. The same idea still exists in the UK, with competing offerings from the BBC and the commercial networks, directed at kids, much slicker and with a huge emphasis on pop music (the evils of which, here in the UK, are legion and these shows probably create the pathetic buying public that feeds the wicked industry to deprive us of our rights of fair use, but I digress). By slicker, I don't mean better, I just mean more scripted, and more polished, live studio. The Saturday morning shows in Oz disappeared with the death of HHIS back in the late eighties. Now there is the "computer driven" 3 hours of music videos or some branded cartoon show "Saturday Disney" for example.
So the experience in Oz would support the original articles position, but the UK does not, perhaps it was never quite the same. But what is interesting is the disappearance of the market (advertising that is). I had never really thought about it before, but I always used to decry that I was just too old for Transformers, and none of the stuff we used to watch never had the good toys. Being oblivious to the fact that the tie in might be a bad thing, in itself. I don't mean in the sense of a barely disgused advert (He-man for example was never that, nor Transformers really) but in terms of making the industry think that the tie in was the way to boost profits and therefore change the commissioning motive. Once the market went away (for wahtever reason) the content too disappeared.
Having said that, I would have said that the "Dexter's Laboratory" or "Cow and Chicken" school, along with the newer CGI stories are actually very good, so I am not sure that the quality is worse, but it is hard to argue that the Saturday moring market has certainly gone away. Perhaps there is space to bring it back in due time, for as we all know, everything old is new again (eventually)
Re:Not-so-junk yard wars
on
Junkyard Wars Tour
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· Score: 3, Informative
Geez, for the last time. _it ain't about building stuff from junk_ it's about science (for want of a better word) education disguised as something that people will actually watch. The original, Scrapheap Challenge, here in the UK (and ain't that name change a bit of cultural giveaway), had no real pretence otherwise.
On a related note, one of the UK presenters (of Scrapheap Challenge), Robert Llewellyn (Kryton from Red Dwarf FWIW) has another great show called "Hollywood Science" where he and a scientist mate pick three films pick a bit of science out of the film and then test to see if it actually works. They then rate the science based on these results from 0-10 and pick a winner for that episode. It's actually pretty cool and some of the stuff they have tested has been very interesting, from explosions in water (some deniro film) to infrared cameras (the Pierce Brosnen remake of the newman film) to the egg eating in "Cool Hand Luke". http://www.open2.net/science/hollywood_science/
Why would i pay to download music on one service, that i can download for free on another?
All the replies to this post are missing the point. They talk about the historical "If only I could pay $1 a track I wouldn't steal" argument or the "Paying for the guaranteed quality or guaranteed albums". Even those that talk about the "premium" price for the convenience of a guaranteed download and always availability, are missing the real point.
The real issue is that _all_ you are paying for is these conveniences. The capital invested in the servers, software, comms and admin to run the service comes out at $0.00X per download and the rest is the price _you_ are willing to pay for the luxury good that is the convenience of all the benefits mentioned by all the other posters. Any portion of the fee that goes to the record company is theft, and is discounting what you are willing to pay for the service by the amount of the royalty, or inflating the price and thus eliminating some downloaders from the process since it is above their threshold.
Do you not worry when something of such an arbitrary price is such a convenient price? I mean jeez, it's less than a buck a track, but then so is $0.98 or $0.37. What manufacturing process is squeezed to hit the $0.99 price point. In competetive business this is the way of things, you target a price point and the constrain the manufacturing process to hit it. Why do you think that a $14 floppy drive is made of plastic?
This whole model is just bollox. IP is bunk and once the track is out there and recorded it should be free for all. That we have to suffer the ignomy of crap downloads from Kazaa et al is the price we have to pay until the law catches up with the truth.
With all the talk about how DRM enabled hardware will "lock out" the use of non DRM enabled software, I am prompted to say.
I choose not to play the game. I am happy to miss out on the latest DRM enabled whizz bang thing (as I have posted before). But let us assume that the mainstream hardware manufacturers go down the path of pandering to the DRM zealots.
Can we create open hardware. I mean, I know that there are certain open hardware products, but can we really create a "Free (as in speech) Hardware" movement, or is the capital barrier too high. Can we get the Fab plant to make chips/drives motherboards, can we even get the designs for hardware to use? If we cannot then are we screwed or is there market enought in the non-DRM world enough for the manufacturers to justify sales, will they even be permitted to manufacture the hardware regardless of the potential market. Will the Chinese come to our rescue by virtue by being big enough and ugly enough to tell the DRM driven west where to get off and proceed to make the un crippled hardware we require?
And even more important than all this, will the governments that are increasing the services they provide via technology based means (for example the internet) retain free standards that do not require their citizens to use a particular OS/DRM regime in order to interact with the organs of the state. It is this aspect of the whole thing that to me is most scary. Scary because it is the classic path to disenfranchisement. Which is a bad thing(TM).
It is the use of IP to restrain access to unencumbered hardware and similary access the services that my government demands I use that concerns me. Whether I get to use the latest online game or not really doesn't matter.
Left and Right == Minimum Living Standard vs Security. Give me a break. In continental Europe your argument is almost sustainable until you identify that the Christian Democratic "right" is still basically a socialist political ideology, funding unemployment benefits, health care and education. The problem is that the left and right of politics in a "civil society" (and I mean that in a technical sense) is not as relevant as the other dimension of Totalitarianism versus liberalism. A cute site to illustrate is www.politicalcompass.org.
I would quite happily describe my politics as right of centre (eg deregulated labour market and what it implies), but if someone was to call me a socialist because I believe in free healthcare, seondary education and a safety net of unemployment benfits, then so be it, however I would be deeply concenred to be classed as anything other than a libertarian because I believe very stringlky that the state has little or o place in my private life and the goal should be for the _reduction_ in power of the state as our societies expand and we become more civilised. That the contrary movement in power is true breaks my heart. But I digress.
The erosion of liberites by the state is the real fight. Forget the left and right. It is irrelevant and both sides will just as happily do the deed. To focus on the left and right will alienate those who are libertarians first and politicians second and make it impossible for the libertarian front to consoplidate and stop the death of a thousand cuts to which our liberty is being subjected (around the western democratic world)
People that don't read the source code arent the sort of people who are likely to rember names IMO. (Or care about names generaly for that matter)
No way. In the new world order where IP goes away, your reputation as a contributor to software will be your stock in trade. It will be the means by which you price your services to those that would consume them from projects to emplyers. It is absolutely critical that software is correctly attributed and that it should be easy and proiminant.
You see someone who takes attributed code and claims it as their own is committing fraud an ancient wrong that is straightforward to prosecute. The commercial damage to one so wronged is an intruiging question but once the value of reputation in this new order is understood then the value of such damage will be eaiser to understand, both in terms of the private actionable wrong but also the public policy issue in ensuring that work is attributed accurately and completely.
Nope. These cases would only be vexatious if the claims were groundless. The class action thing in the US is designed to make the prosecution of the N legitimate claims less onerous on both the plaintiff and the defendent. But everyone wronged is entitled to runa claim for damages.
Is this really a problem? I've never been to London, but any city I have been to, the cabs were almost frantic to pull over and let you in. In New York, I've had cabbies pull over and ask if I wanted a ride when I was just standing there.
You need to know about "cabs" in London. First there are two kinds, proper cabs, or "black cabs" as they are often called (actually hackney carriages but I digress). Currently these require a specifically authorised vehicle with disabled access, insurance, regular maintenance, etc, etc and above all else a licensed driver who has passed "The Knowledge" by which they should be able to know any street within a 6 mile radius of Charing Cross. Yes, and that is pretty much actually true, get in the back, give an address and they will be able to get you there without referring to a map (it's pretty incredible), for this you pay a premium price.
Then there is mini-cab scum, which can basically be a bloke and a car, and that's about it, you negotiate price with varying rates of success based on time of day, distance, number of passengers, liklehood of one of the passengers despoiling the vehicle and blood alcohol level of both driver and passenger. There is virtually no regulation of this service. Very scary
In between these two are more reputable mini-cab firms, not the knowledge of the black cabs but not quite so dodgy as the bloke on the street, but here to there is a lack of regulation and a sliding scale of reliability and competence from just above dodgy to as good as a black cab but without passing the knowledge (for a variety of reasons, some not so good).
I have cabbed it all over the world from the grease covered toyota's of Jakarta, to hailing some guy with his groceries and wife and kids in a Lada in Moscow, to cabs of varying kinds in London. Black Cabs for all their faults offer the best service in the world (and much comedy value if one gets the right cabbie who would like to share with you his view on the current state of the world).
They did. They were taken to court. They got slammed. They don't anymore. Patience my friend, patience. The DMCA will get to court over stuff like this, it will be found that this is an inappropriate use and the aftermarket business will flourish again. It's just that it will take time or activists, I have one but not the other.
I do buy a ton of DVDs though. The reaso nbeing there is great value in DVDs. I get superior picture quality and sound, a nice keep case, art work, special features, comentaries, interactive content, all for $14-$21.
I do not mean to preach, and I am certainly not criticising, but I too used to buy many DVD and then I had a revelation that if I was going to gripe about the actions of the MPAA et al I really ought not to fund them through the taxes inherent in my DVD purchases (by taxes I mean non cost based elements of price) [I don't buy non artist produced CD's either for the same reason]. So I stopped and despite the occasional pain, I haven't bought a DVD in about 18 months, maybe longer. Now I am not throwing out my old ones, and I believe in the DVD standard, but I just can't justify funding the studios whilst they proceed to try and eliminate my rights. I still go to the cinema, perhaps I should stop that as well, but at least there I am paying for the other aspects of the cinema experience and funding an industry in which I believe (the cinema industry)
Misunderstanding
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think a lot of people here are reading too much into Linus's statement "On the whole, this is just another example of why rms calls me "just an engineer" and thinks I have no ideals." I do not believe that Linus is (a) making any reference to RMS position on DRM; or (b) suggesting that this is an issue over which they have a difference of opinion, just that he is saying he is infavour of _not_ letting ideals get in the way of his engineering.
Further, RMS must support rights management, since the GPL is a rights (or lefts) based device. That the management of rights over the digital domain should be excluded from the principle seems counterintuitive to me. Even when one acknowledges that Digital Right Managment is such a misleading name for the idea, Digitial Freedom Restrictions would be much better, RMS still has to be in favour (perhaps not, because I am sure he would recognise the pain of the implementation) since the GPL effectively restricts ones freedom to use GPLed stuff as one pleases.
This is why I disagree with him (RMS). Copyleft still relies on the existence of property in ideas (or the manifestation of those ideas, the "output of intellect" as I like to call it) and it is the existence of property in these things that is broken (IMHO) where there is no property the vendor of the thing is perfectly entitled to do what they like to DRM their thing, but they are subject to the normal vagaries of competition law and that will become an increasingly powerful (despite the recent microsoft case) avenue as industry consolidations increase. But by the same token the punter is entitled to do what they like with what they are given when they make the purchase and no amount of fannying about with "license" based restrictions will do any good (when there is no propoerty that is).
Just from watching the trailer, I think they blew it. The big green guy looks totally disproportonate, like an oversized mal-colored smurf.
I disagree, I like the _huge_ hulk of the old marvel paper cutout cartoons and of the various historical comics themselves. This guy usd to _jump_ between pacific islands. Lou was never big enough for my liking. And it was the width thing that was the kicker, he was talk enough and "big enough" but just too narrow. hulk needs to be the side of a house big. Although having said that, it would make the trousers staying on around the waist even les belivable:-). Then again different strokes for different strokes
You, a programmer, create some wonderful technology. It's so wonderful, in fact, that it spreads all over the world and is used by nearly everyone on a daily basis.
Then you say
Would you not want some measure of control on this technology that you labored over for so many hours?
and
Would you not like some shred of claim to its origin?
The two are completely different. Control implies IP whereas claim to it's origin requires no property whatsoever, and the remedies for a wrong against authorship are quite well established. So, no I do not want control, but yes I require "acknowledgement" of authorship. So no Mr Northrup is NOT on the good side in this fight.
The correct solution (in the sense of being minimally intrusive while solving the problem) would have been to legally limit the liability of car drivers who hit helmetless motorcyclists.
Er, well not "correct", even given your rider of "minimally intrusive". The limitation of liability is rarely a good thing (leave out punitive damages which is a peculiarly American problem where limits might well be a good thing:-). If you evaluate damage objectively but arbitrarily cap the amount of that damage for which any person is liable you end up with these horrible diseconomies where it makes commercial sense for people to offend since the liability cap is constrained it may well be less than the cost of fixing the original problem (car safety is the classic example here).
The correct approach is to correctly identify that the (helmet wearing or not) motor cyclist is a contributing factor to the amount of damage that is incurred (to all the cyclists, this isn't a flame just a fact), that is, if you hit a cyclist you are likely to cause them more damage than if you hit a car driver, and then discount the amount of damages accordingly. That way you end up with a more reasonably liability, but no limit for the truly culpable.
To draw this idea back to the original point about reasonableness of restriction in an EULA, it seems to me that such restrictions are not valid but that the same idea of contributory negligence (negligence is really the wrong word but it will do) would provide all the defence necessary to avoid the vendor sufferring for people using the product inappropriately.
Now, as for the extent to which "inappropriate use" of a product is a defence for liability, it certainly seems the case that certain jurisdictions have lost the plot in this area but the rectification of that issue is quite separate from the goodness of the idea in general:-P
Primarily, yes it is just a spelling variant, and it is most often used to provide a sense of age, since the spelling was much more common in the pre 20th century context. However, the webster's 1913 entry http://machaut.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/WEBSTER.sh?WOR D=gaol shows that there seems to be a specific hostorical context for the contunued use of Gaol, (see the Gaol Delivery bit).
I'd like to bring up another thread - the appropriate use of prisons in our society.
Thank you. But you have only identified half the problem. The real issue is the criminalisation of civil wrongs. It is _extremely_ distressing the extent to which wrongs, and I too choose not to decide if what this guy dud was actually wrong, of a commercial nature are being treated as criminal acts. The issue of the correct form of punishment is somewhat late after the fact.
Even up until the 18th and 19th century there was imprisonment for debt, a truly nefarious practice whereby debtors were sent to gaol fro their inability to pay debts, the absurdity of this in that being in gaol robbed most of them of their capacity to repay the debt first incurred eventually lead to statutory prohibition on IFD. Have a look at any UK derived commonwealth (including most all of the US states) and you will find such a prohibition. The trend we are now observing with the DMCA etc is just wrong, eventually (and if we actually get off our asses, me included, it might be sooner) this will be fixed, but it's going to be later rather than sooner.
And it sure as heck tastes better than anything that comes out of the microwave.
I am sorry but I beg to differ. Cooking by microwave has excellent capacity for producing healthy, tasty meals, efficiently. A few heads of broccoli, some snow peas (mange tout), plus a salmon steak on top (on a rack if needs be) is certrainly a match for the steak and potatoes INM(NS)HO. Even the crock pot would probably work. But then the personal taste issues of "stew" vs "steamed" is a subjective argument and one I choose not to have because "each to their own" is a good motto by which to post:-)
Does Oracle block writes as well during long queries, or is this genuinely a mySQL-only problem?
Yes and No, and in truth this applies for all trhe RDBMS I have worked with (Informix, Sybase and Oracle) so I am pretty sure that it is universally true. You can select that your query (or update) will record lock or table lock (or in some cases page lock, kinda between the two) this is more an issue with updates rather than queries but by default most databases will lock even for queries, unless you tell the db that you are happy to read a dirty record (in informix for example, "set somethingorother to dirty read") which will allow you to read a table even if it is being locked by another process. It is clear that mysql is not quite there in this regard, but a quick search of the mysql site shows that http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Internal_locking.html does seem to have some functionality that might help you optimise (I suspect that postgress might be a little more capabale in this area but I have no information).
I think a quantum language would half to assume the answer. eg:
factor ( int c ){
int a, b;
a * b = c;
a > 1;
b > 1;
c > a;
c > b;
b >= a;
print a, b;
}
if c = 91, then it would print 7, 13 - because that's the only answer, and if there was no answer than it would be null, it there were multiple answers it would print a random working answer.
I am sorry but that is RDB programming 201, ok maybe 301, but oracle will die just as fast with non indexed queries, it ain't rocket science and it aint magic. If you do a query that results in a table scan (or god forbid a cross product table scan) there aint no RDBMS in the world that will save you from the pain.
In retrospect I think I am being a bit harsh I learnt more about query optimising in the first three months of my job working with a guy who new it for years than I did in 6 years at university studying Comp Sci, including some deep DB engine design stuff.
The Keep (1983) - Michael Mann (yes that one!) http://us.imdb.com/Title?0085780
Amazing soundtrack (if you get the Tangerine Dream one) very atmospheric and a great cast (not so great performances perhaps). I suspect that the editing room floor has some important bits of film since there are places where it doesn't scan right, but a cool film noone has ever heard of.
A truly magnificent film. At times it is my favourite film. I think the theme of a friendship so strong that one would destroy it rather than let the other suffer for lack of unpleasant action is,... well special.
As for the style, well there is just sooooo much style in this film.
I regularly find Cohen brother fans who have never heard of this. So I think it qualifies as underrated.
Slashdot Mirror
In Australia, for god knows how many years (1971-83 with a brief hiatus in '78, thanks google http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/H/htmlH/heyheyit s/heyheyits.htm) there was a live (and _oh_ yes it was live) TV show that was from than venerable classification "variety". Called "Hey Hey It's Saturday" it eventually capitulated to it's adult following and went to an evening timslot and then died the horrible death of a show without ideas. But when it was on in the mornings, from 8am to 11am, preceded by an hour of cartoons, which in turn was preceded by "The Thunderbirds" on and endless cycle of reruns, it was a truly bizarre combination of a guy behind a desk, an ostrich puppet (don't ask) and a female offsider for comedy value. Hard to describe really, but the point was that it did some cartoons, severe double entendre, comedy, sketches, popular music and competitions. Basically it was the show's cast having a party and we were invited to watch and participate. The same idea still exists in the UK, with competing offerings from the BBC and the commercial networks, directed at kids, much slicker and with a huge emphasis on pop music (the evils of which, here in the UK, are legion and these shows probably create the pathetic buying public that feeds the wicked industry to deprive us of our rights of fair use, but I digress). By slicker, I don't mean better, I just mean more scripted, and more polished, live studio. The Saturday morning shows in Oz disappeared with the death of HHIS back in the late eighties. Now there is the "computer driven" 3 hours of music videos or some branded cartoon show "Saturday Disney" for example.
So the experience in Oz would support the original articles position, but the UK does not, perhaps it was never quite the same. But what is interesting is the disappearance of the market (advertising that is). I had never really thought about it before, but I always used to decry that I was just too old for Transformers, and none of the stuff we used to watch never had the good toys. Being oblivious to the fact that the tie in might be a bad thing, in itself. I don't mean in the sense of a barely disgused advert (He-man for example was never that, nor Transformers really) but in terms of making the industry think that the tie in was the way to boost profits and therefore change the commissioning motive. Once the market went away (for wahtever reason) the content too disappeared.
Having said that, I would have said that the "Dexter's Laboratory" or "Cow and Chicken" school, along with the newer CGI stories are actually very good, so I am not sure that the quality is worse, but it is hard to argue that the Saturday moring market has certainly gone away. Perhaps there is space to bring it back in due time, for as we all know, everything old is new again (eventually)
Geez, for the last time. _it ain't about building stuff from junk_ it's about science (for want of a better word) education disguised as something that people will actually watch. The original, Scrapheap Challenge, here in the UK (and ain't that name change a bit of cultural giveaway), had no real pretence otherwise.
On a related note, one of the UK presenters (of Scrapheap Challenge), Robert Llewellyn (Kryton from Red Dwarf FWIW) has another great show called "Hollywood Science" where he and a scientist mate pick three films pick a bit of science out of the film and then test to see if it actually works. They then rate the science based on these results from 0-10 and pick a winner for that episode. It's actually pretty cool and some of the stuff they have tested has been very interesting, from explosions in water (some deniro film) to infrared cameras (the Pierce Brosnen remake of the newman film) to the egg eating in "Cool Hand Luke". http://www.open2.net/science/hollywood_science/
Why would i pay to download music on one service, that i can download for free on another?
All the replies to this post are missing the point. They talk about the historical "If only I could pay $1 a track I wouldn't steal" argument or the "Paying for the guaranteed quality or guaranteed albums". Even those that talk about the "premium" price for the convenience of a guaranteed download and always availability, are missing the real point.
The real issue is that _all_ you are paying for is these conveniences. The capital invested in the servers, software, comms and admin to run the service comes out at $0.00X per download and the rest is the price _you_ are willing to pay for the luxury good that is the convenience of all the benefits mentioned by all the other posters. Any portion of the fee that goes to the record company is theft, and is discounting what you are willing to pay for the service by the amount of the royalty, or inflating the price and thus eliminating some downloaders from the process since it is above their threshold.
Do you not worry when something of such an arbitrary price is such a convenient price? I mean jeez, it's less than a buck a track, but then so is $0.98 or $0.37. What manufacturing process is squeezed to hit the $0.99 price point. In competetive business this is the way of things, you target a price point and the constrain the manufacturing process to hit it. Why do you think that a $14 floppy drive is made of plastic?
This whole model is just bollox. IP is bunk and once the track is out there and recorded it should be free for all. That we have to suffer the ignomy of crap downloads from Kazaa et al is the price we have to pay until the law catches up with the truth.
With all the talk about how DRM enabled hardware will "lock out" the use of non DRM enabled software, I am prompted to say.
I choose not to play the game. I am happy to miss out on the latest DRM enabled whizz bang thing (as I have posted before). But let us assume that the mainstream hardware manufacturers go down the path of pandering to the DRM zealots.
Can we create open hardware. I mean, I know that there are certain open hardware products, but can we really create a "Free (as in speech) Hardware" movement, or is the capital barrier too high. Can we get the Fab plant to make chips/drives motherboards, can we even get the designs for hardware to use? If we cannot then are we screwed or is there market enought in the non-DRM world enough for the manufacturers to justify sales, will they even be permitted to manufacture the hardware regardless of the potential market. Will the Chinese come to our rescue by virtue by being big enough and ugly enough to tell the DRM driven west where to get off and proceed to make the un crippled hardware we require?
And even more important than all this, will the governments that are increasing the services they provide via technology based means (for example the internet) retain free standards that do not require their citizens to use a particular OS/DRM regime in order to interact with the organs of the state. It is this aspect of the whole thing that to me is most scary. Scary because it is the classic path to disenfranchisement. Which is a bad thing(TM).
It is the use of IP to restrain access to unencumbered hardware and similary access the services that my government demands I use that concerns me. Whether I get to use the latest online game or not really doesn't matter.
Left and Right == Minimum Living Standard vs Security. Give me a break. In continental Europe your argument is almost sustainable until you identify that the Christian Democratic "right" is still basically a socialist political ideology, funding unemployment benefits, health care and education. The problem is that the left and right of politics in a "civil society" (and I mean that in a technical sense) is not as relevant as the other dimension of Totalitarianism versus liberalism. A cute site to illustrate is www.politicalcompass.org.
I would quite happily describe my politics as right of centre (eg deregulated labour market and what it implies), but if someone was to call me a socialist because I believe in free healthcare, seondary education and a safety net of unemployment benfits, then so be it, however I would be deeply concenred to be classed as anything other than a libertarian because I believe very stringlky that the state has little or o place in my private life and the goal should be for the _reduction_ in power of the state as our societies expand and we become more civilised. That the contrary movement in power is true breaks my heart. But I digress.
The erosion of liberites by the state is the real fight. Forget the left and right. It is irrelevant and both sides will just as happily do the deed. To focus on the left and right will alienate those who are libertarians first and politicians second and make it impossible for the libertarian front to consoplidate and stop the death of a thousand cuts to which our liberty is being subjected (around the western democratic world)
People that don't read the source code arent the sort of people who are likely to rember names IMO. (Or care about names generaly for that matter)
No way. In the new world order where IP goes away, your reputation as a contributor to software will be your stock in trade. It will be the means by which you price your services to those that would consume them from projects to emplyers. It is absolutely critical that software is correctly attributed and that it should be easy and proiminant.
You see someone who takes attributed code and claims it as their own is committing fraud an ancient wrong that is straightforward to prosecute. The commercial damage to one so wronged is an intruiging question but once the value of reputation in this new order is understood then the value of such damage will be eaiser to understand, both in terms of the private actionable wrong but also the public policy issue in ensuring that work is attributed accurately and completely.
Nope. These cases would only be vexatious if the claims were groundless. The class action thing in the US is designed to make the prosecution of the N legitimate claims less onerous on both the plaintiff and the defendent. But everyone wronged is entitled to runa claim for damages.
Post an article describing how easy it is to be a Karma whore and the Karma will flow
Is this really a problem? I've never been to London, but any city I have been to, the cabs were almost frantic to pull over and let you in. In New York, I've had cabbies pull over and ask if I wanted a ride when I was just standing there.
You need to know about "cabs" in London. First there are two kinds, proper cabs, or "black cabs" as they are often called (actually hackney carriages but I digress). Currently these require a specifically authorised vehicle with disabled access, insurance, regular maintenance, etc, etc and above all else a licensed driver who has passed "The Knowledge" by which they should be able to know any street within a 6 mile radius of Charing Cross. Yes, and that is pretty much actually true, get in the back, give an address and they will be able to get you there without referring to a map (it's pretty incredible), for this you pay a premium price.
Then there is mini-cab scum, which can basically be a bloke and a car, and that's about it, you negotiate price with varying rates of success based on time of day, distance, number of passengers, liklehood of one of the passengers despoiling the vehicle and blood alcohol level of both driver and passenger. There is virtually no regulation of this service. Very scaryIn between these two are more reputable mini-cab firms, not the knowledge of the black cabs but not quite so dodgy as the bloke on the street, but here to there is a lack of regulation and a sliding scale of reliability and competence from just above dodgy to as good as a black cab but without passing the knowledge (for a variety of reasons, some not so good).
I have cabbed it all over the world from the grease covered toyota's of Jakarta, to hailing some guy with his groceries and wife and kids in a Lada in Moscow, to cabs of varying kinds in London. Black Cabs for all their faults offer the best service in the world (and much comedy value if one gets the right cabbie who would like to share with you his view on the current state of the world).
I play a constant game of hopping in and out of cabs until I find a driver willing to take me to my neighborhood
Try getting a london cab to go south of the river after 9pm, even with tariff 3!! Just goes to show ya, ya don't wanta live south of the river :-)
Imagine if GM did the following [...]
They did. They were taken to court. They got slammed. They don't anymore. Patience my friend, patience. The DMCA will get to court over stuff like this, it will be found that this is an inappropriate use and the aftermarket business will flourish again. It's just that it will take time or activists, I have one but not the other.
K & Ritchies ANSI C book sets a fine standard for concise technical books.
Beyond setting a fine example, K&R is a positive indictment of thick books:
"C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book"
Beautiful, so beautiful. sed "s/C/[many languages]/".
I do buy a ton of DVDs though. The reaso nbeing there is great value in DVDs. I get superior picture quality and sound, a nice keep case, art work, special features, comentaries, interactive content, all for $14-$21.
I do not mean to preach, and I am certainly not criticising, but I too used to buy many DVD and then I had a revelation that if I was going to gripe about the actions of the MPAA et al I really ought not to fund them through the taxes inherent in my DVD purchases (by taxes I mean non cost based elements of price) [I don't buy non artist produced CD's either for the same reason]. So I stopped and despite the occasional pain, I haven't bought a DVD in about 18 months, maybe longer. Now I am not throwing out my old ones, and I believe in the DVD standard, but I just can't justify funding the studios whilst they proceed to try and eliminate my rights. I still go to the cinema, perhaps I should stop that as well, but at least there I am paying for the other aspects of the cinema experience and funding an industry in which I believe (the cinema industry)
I think a lot of people here are reading too much into Linus's statement "On the whole, this is just another example of why rms calls me "just an engineer" and thinks I have no ideals." I do not believe that Linus is (a) making any reference to RMS position on DRM; or (b) suggesting that this is an issue over which they have a difference of opinion, just that he is saying he is infavour of _not_ letting ideals get in the way of his engineering.
Further, RMS must support rights management, since the GPL is a rights (or lefts) based device. That the management of rights over the digital domain should be excluded from the principle seems counterintuitive to me. Even when one acknowledges that Digital Right Managment is such a misleading name for the idea, Digitial Freedom Restrictions would be much better, RMS still has to be in favour (perhaps not, because I am sure he would recognise the pain of the implementation) since the GPL effectively restricts ones freedom to use GPLed stuff as one pleases.
This is why I disagree with him (RMS). Copyleft still relies on the existence of property in ideas (or the manifestation of those ideas, the "output of intellect" as I like to call it) and it is the existence of property in these things that is broken (IMHO) where there is no property the vendor of the thing is perfectly entitled to do what they like to DRM their thing, but they are subject to the normal vagaries of competition law and that will become an increasingly powerful (despite the recent microsoft case) avenue as industry consolidations increase. But by the same token the punter is entitled to do what they like with what they are given when they make the purchase and no amount of fannying about with "license" based restrictions will do any good (when there is no propoerty that is).
From my perspective there is only one valid
Just from watching the trailer, I think they blew it. The big green guy looks totally disproportonate, like an oversized mal-colored smurf.
I disagree, I like the _huge_ hulk of the old marvel paper cutout cartoons and of the various historical comics themselves. This guy usd to _jump_ between pacific islands. Lou was never big enough for my liking. And it was the width thing that was the kicker, he was talk enough and "big enough" but just too narrow. hulk needs to be the side of a house big. Although having said that, it would make the trousers staying on around the waist even les belivable :-). Then again different strokes for different strokes
You, a programmer, create some wonderful technology. It's so wonderful, in fact, that it spreads all over the world and is used by nearly everyone on a daily basis.
Then you say
Would you not want some measure of control on this technology that you labored over for so many hours?
and
Would you not like some shred of claim to its origin?
The two are completely different. Control implies IP whereas claim to it's origin requires no property whatsoever, and the remedies for a wrong against authorship are quite well established. So, no I do not want control, but yes I require "acknowledgement" of authorship. So no Mr Northrup is NOT on the good side in this fight.
The correct solution (in the sense of being minimally intrusive while solving the problem) would have been to legally limit the liability of car drivers who hit helmetless motorcyclists.
Er, well not "correct", even given your rider of "minimally intrusive". The limitation of liability is rarely a good thing (leave out punitive damages which is a peculiarly American problem where limits might well be a good thing :-). If you evaluate damage objectively but arbitrarily cap the amount of that damage for which any person is liable you end up with these horrible diseconomies where it makes commercial sense for people to offend since the liability cap is constrained it may well be less than the cost of fixing the original problem (car safety is the classic example here).
The correct approach is to correctly identify that the (helmet wearing or not) motor cyclist is a contributing factor to the amount of damage that is incurred (to all the cyclists, this isn't a flame just a fact), that is, if you hit a cyclist you are likely to cause them more damage than if you hit a car driver, and then discount the amount of damages accordingly. That way you end up with a more reasonably liability, but no limit for the truly culpable.
To draw this idea back to the original point about reasonableness of restriction in an EULA, it seems to me that such restrictions are not valid but that the same idea of contributory negligence (negligence is really the wrong word but it will do) would provide all the defence necessary to avoid the vendor sufferring for people using the product inappropriately.
Now, as for the extent to which "inappropriate use" of a product is a defence for liability, it certainly seems the case that certain jurisdictions have lost the plot in this area but the rectification of that issue is quite separate from the goodness of the idea in general :-P
Primarily, yes it is just a spelling variant, and it is most often used to provide a sense of age, since the spelling was much more common in the pre 20th century context. However, the webster's 1913 entry http://machaut.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/WEBSTER.sh?WOR D=gaol shows that there seems to be a specific hostorical context for the contunued use of Gaol, (see the Gaol Delivery bit).
I'd like to bring up another thread - the appropriate use of prisons in our society.
Thank you. But you have only identified half the problem. The real issue is the criminalisation of civil wrongs. It is _extremely_ distressing the extent to which wrongs, and I too choose not to decide if what this guy dud was actually wrong, of a commercial nature are being treated as criminal acts. The issue of the correct form of punishment is somewhat late after the fact.
Even up until the 18th and 19th century there was imprisonment for debt, a truly nefarious practice whereby debtors were sent to gaol fro their inability to pay debts, the absurdity of this in that being in gaol robbed most of them of their capacity to repay the debt first incurred eventually lead to statutory prohibition on IFD. Have a look at any UK derived commonwealth (including most all of the US states) and you will find such a prohibition. The trend we are now observing with the DMCA etc is just wrong, eventually (and if we actually get off our asses, me included, it might be sooner) this will be fixed, but it's going to be later rather than sooner.
And it sure as heck tastes better than anything that comes out of the microwave.
I am sorry but I beg to differ. Cooking by microwave has excellent capacity for producing healthy, tasty meals, efficiently. A few heads of broccoli, some snow peas (mange tout), plus a salmon steak on top (on a rack if needs be) is certrainly a match for the steak and potatoes INM(NS)HO. Even the crock pot would probably work. But then the personal taste issues of "stew" vs "steamed" is a subjective argument and one I choose not to have because "each to their own" is a good motto by which to post :-)
Does Oracle block writes as well during long queries, or is this genuinely a mySQL-only problem?
Yes and No, and in truth this applies for all trhe RDBMS I have worked with (Informix, Sybase and Oracle) so I am pretty sure that it is universally true. You can select that your query (or update) will record lock or table lock (or in some cases page lock, kinda between the two) this is more an issue with updates rather than queries but by default most databases will lock even for queries, unless you tell the db that you are happy to read a dirty record (in informix for example, "set somethingorother to dirty read") which will allow you to read a table even if it is being locked by another process. It is clear that mysql is not quite there in this regard, but a quick search of the mysql site shows that http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Internal_locking.html does seem to have some functionality that might help you optimise (I suspect that postgress might be a little more capabale in this area but I have no information).
I think a quantum language would half to assume the answer. eg: factor ( int c ){ int a, b; a * b = c; a > 1; b > 1; c > a; c > b; b >= a; print a, b; } if c = 91, then it would print 7, 13 - because that's the only answer, and if there was no answer than it would be null, it there were multiple answers it would print a random working answer.
Well done you have just written a prolog program
I am sorry but that is RDB programming 201, ok maybe 301, but oracle will die just as fast with non indexed queries, it ain't rocket science and it aint magic. If you do a query that results in a table scan (or god forbid a cross product table scan) there aint no RDBMS in the world that will save you from the pain.
In retrospect I think I am being a bit harsh I learnt more about query optimising in the first three months of my job working with a guy who new it for years than I did in 6 years at university studying Comp Sci, including some deep DB engine design stuff.
The Keep (1983) - Michael Mann (yes that one!) http://us.imdb.com/Title?0085780
Amazing soundtrack (if you get the Tangerine Dream one) very atmospheric and a great cast (not so great performances perhaps). I suspect that the editing room floor has some important bits of film since there are places where it doesn't scan right, but a cool film noone has ever heard of.
A truly magnificent film. At times it is my favourite film. I think the theme of a friendship so strong that one would destroy it rather than let the other suffer for lack of unpleasant action is, ... well special.
As for the style, well there is just sooooo much style in this film.
I regularly find Cohen brother fans who have never heard of this. So I think it qualifies as underrated.