Well to be fair if you can still get to the websites you want to go to, then what is someone supposed to be upset over? And you accept substandard service (purposefully sabotaged, in fact) because it gets the job done? I see it as an insult. Not to mention that needing to reload pages is a hamper on productivity.
If you shouldn't sue, what should you do when someone bigger and stronger than you does something wrong to you? Law enforcement's not gonna help, they don't care about trivialities. Personally, I'm happy about this lawsuit, because it may serve as a reminder to Google not to go over the line when making private things public.
The inevitable result is a race to the bottom. Buyers will reason they might was well buy cheap, because they at least know they're saving money, rather then paying for quality and likely not getting it. That's the description of a lemon market. However, I don't think it applies here, because brands gain reputations in this realm. If one brand of hard drives becomes known as flaky, people (and OEMs) will stop buying it.
Teachers have that right, not students. You say that as though "fair use" were well defined. If there's one thing slashdot has taught me, it's that there are several factors that go into determining whether something is fair use, and there's really no way to make a definitive judgement about it (unless you're... um, a judge).
I'm sure there are circumstances where a student could be considered an educator (if they are a tutor, for instance).
I believe that if an employer pays an employee to produce a work, by convention, the employer owns the copyright. I'm really curious whether teaching falls under this scenario. It seems like at the very least, the student (the client, the one paying for a service) should be entitled to a non-exclusive right to use class materials (produced by the teacher for the class) for any purpose... but I really don't know. In this case, I wonder if the teacher sold or gave rights to multiple parties in a way he shouldn't have?
it doesn't actually have a well-defined radius (since you can't measure across the middle!)
Why do you need to measure *across* the middle to measure the radius?
Is there a (theoretical) problem with using some kind of high tech space calipers to measure the radius without going anywhere near the 'middle'? You could, but the result wouldn't really be right. A black hole is like that blessed +2 bag of holding that has much more room inside it than the space that it actually encompasses. I never really studied general relativity, but I think that when an object is in a strong gravity field, it becomes shorter (or everything else becomes longer). This means that the notion of length gets a bit weird. Similarly, if you used calipers to measure the diameter of a block hole, the sides of the calipers would no longer be straight, as they got closer to the black hole, due to the way gravity bends space.
I hope I'm not totally wrong about this... I'm working from an analog of special relativity, which I did study a little...
Maybe you should transfer. If they hire admins that bad, what does it say about the rest of their staff? That's like saying, "Oh, don't study physics at that school--just look at their biology department, it's terrible!" Furthermore, I did think about transferring a few years ago (because of a more relevant concern), but for better or worse, I stayed, and I'm graduating in June. No transfer for me.
They disabled right clicking in general. To rename a file, I have to do "file -> rename". There is no way to look at a folder's properties, because "file -> properties" is also disabled (so good luck freeing up disk on your network space when you can't see the folder sizes). Apparently, it's harder to mess up the computers without right clicking. These restrictions do not seem to apply to Firefox, Java, and some other non-Microsoft apps. Thank God they are written in a way that ignores stupid settings.
Really, if this was more than a flame i would love to know. What really can you do in Adobe products that I can't do in OSS ones? Primarily, I think it's the interface, and for me, it has to do with layers. When a tool is used in photoshop (like drawing a square or adding text), a layer is created that represents that addition. This layer is easy to move. When I create a text layer in the gimp, I have to click within a very small portion of the added text to move the layer. That's merely annoying, but it's just one example of how design is harder to do in the gimp. Another is that layers can't be grouped in order to apply effects to all of them. Also, these "ghost layers" seem to be created more often in photoshop than in the gimp. This makes design easier. (What I'm trying to substantiate is that photoshop feels easier, and I don't have very much evidence, I admit.) Here's another example: how hard is it to draw a circle or square in the gimp? Make a selection (the gimp has excellent selection tools, I know), then do "selection to path" then "feather path". I would really just prefer a few shape drawing tools.
These criticisms really just apply to design. For editing of something that already exists, I'm not sure photoshop has anything over the gimp. Also, the ability to script the gimp with scheme (or python, I think) is a big win--I've only used this once, but I would never have wanted to [resize, sharpen, adjust contrast] 600 images by hand!
This browser seems like the sort of thing that big companies might like to install on their workstations. After all, they don't care that much about usability (my university currently has right clicking disabled--there are quite a few things that are harder or impossible if you can't right click). I don't mean to say that this browser will be unusable--it's just that a corporation might sacrifice speed and flexibility for security. This browser might also be good for kiosks.
1. I'm remodeling my house. I go down to Home Despot/Slowes and buy a dozen smoke detectors. Would I get pulled over for being a suspected terrorist? Whether they would search you without permission would be a more interesting question. I think the police are well within their rights to pull you over and ask why you're emitting radiation. After all, the constitution doesn't prevent us from being stopped and asked questions.
2. I'm a cancer patient undergoing radiation therapy. What can be done to prevent the horror of being pulled over by the KGB? Would it be reasonable to issue "radiology patient" tags, like they issue handicapped tags for the handicapped?
3. What is the false positive rate of such monitoring? Here, we have a cute example of a sick cat setting off a false positive. What about other incidents like this that fail to get into the newspaper? I'm not sure this matters. Are people's rights being trampled as a result of this monitoring? I'd feel more strongly about this story if there was mention of someone getting arrested, hassled, held, etc. On the other hand, if they detect cancer patients, they must pull people over pretty frequently, and the program may never catch a terrorist... well, good thing I'm not in politics.
To add to that, if you are following a pattern of "red blue blue" (the important part is that it has three steps), and you notice you are in some city, and three steps ago, you were at that same city, you can subtract 3*n steps off of the rest of the plan, because you know you will just cycle for that amount of time. So the plan won't necessarily be incredibly inefficient, because it can be intelligently pruned.
The problem with using purely functional programming techniques for concurrency is that you must constrain the topology of your concurrent computation to that of a tree. No cycles, no sideways references allowed, or you have to work out a synchronization mechanism, and none are known that are free from side-effects. Interesting... that's true.
The Ruby syntax tree needs an LL(k) parser. This tighly couples the parser to the lexical analyser which makes any it deeply flawed, buggy and unreliable. Add into the mix that ruby is really a dynamic scripting language and you find an explaination for it's unreliablility. Is this flamebait? That's a pretty bad analysis, because its conclusions are false. Are ruby parsers buggy? The one you can download from ruby-lang.org isn't. Is Ruby unreliable? Only insofar as I can use it to write bad programs.
As for your second point, I agree that PHP is more suited for most web sites that Ruby. I would probably use Rails if (and only if) I had a web site in mind that was well suited to the "model view controller" idea.
But from reading your post, you have clearly never tried Ruby. You didn't criticize the right things;).
Are there any languages that are more efficient for multithreaded programing? Well, if you are happy programming in a functional style, Haskell has fairly nice parallel capabilities. (However, the difference between Haskell and C++ or Java is so large that you probably oughtn't learn it if you aren't interested in the language for its own sake.)
The basic idea is this: in Haskell (or most other functional languages), you know that different function calls will not interfere with each other (everything is thread safe out of the box), so they can be evaluated in parallel. Function evaluations can be parallelized with the infix operator par. The following evaluates "part1" and "part2" in parallel, before storing them together, as a pair:
let result = (part1 `par` part2) `seq` (part1,part2)
No locks, no writing explicitly threadsafe code. I'm sure there are other languages that are good for parallelism, Haskell just happens to be the one I'm learning.
Was anybody else really confused for a second when they read the headline "Linux X Windows"? What does this article have to do with X-Windows? Then I realized they meant "versus".
In all serious, is there any past evidence either way, that Microsoft would or would not respect a promise not to sue somebody for using their protocols/documentation/formats? Many companies use patents in two ways: - Market fodder. (I.e., "our cool product has patents pending.") - Defense, so that if somebody sues them, they could probably countersue.
I absolutely agree with you--anybody who doesn't see microsoft innovation isn't looking in the right places..NET and the idea of multiple languages being able to use the same libraries is very cool. Also see f#, a new functional language that microsoft research is creating. See also Haskell (a new favorite of mine), whose (possibly) most influential developer has been employed my microsoft research for ten years.
Even if windows vista is a flop, it does include innovative technologies. When is the last time that you shrunk a partition on the fly, while it was mounted? (Take that, partition magic.) I haven't used vista enough to name its other interesting features, but I'm sure it has them.
They're not going to just cry and go running home after a FREAKING laser attack. Oh no. You can bet that handfuls of Qassam missiles will rain down on a pretty regular basis. The lasers are for intercepting projectiles, not for retaliation.
Marketing is supposed to make you spend money you wouldn't have otherwise spent?
No, marketings purpose is simply to get you to buy a given product. Marketing is also intended to make you think about a brand or product, and this even works on cheap people like me. (I am almost never swayed to buy based on advertisements, because the thing being advertised is almost never the best price or value.) But even so, ads make a brand stick in my mind, and occasionally, in absence of all other information, I will buy the brand that I have heard of over the one that I haven't.
As for targeted vs. untargeted, I think I prefer targeted ads, because they are more likely to be somewhat entertaining. But any place that closely tracks my behavior for advertising purposes freaks me out. (amazon.com, I'm looking at you!)
That being said,.doc should never be used in a situation where interoperability or even different computers are needing to open up the documents. Docs just weren't meant for that, we've had rtf for quite a while, and between the size and the lack of macros they are far better. Agreed--I can't even transfer certain types of documents between two versions of Microsoft Word, if they are saved as.doc ("a table in this document has become corrupted"). On the other hand, my resume, created in OpenOffice and saved as a.rtf, appears horribly messed up when opened in Word. I'm not convinced there is a current interoperable solution.
When OEMs were releasing their Windows XP computers with 128MB of RAM (256MB with SP2), I always said it was criminal. I had a computer with 128MB ram that came with windows 98. I installed XP on it, and was much happier with XP than I had been with the previous OS. Sure, it was a piece of crap (speed/memory was not the worst of its problems), but I liked XP on that machine. I agree that a customer that bought a computer with 128MB ram and XP was probably getting a raw deal, but in that situation, I would have preferred XP to any prior windows OS.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but the parent post perplexes me: at this time, the parent post is rated "-1", but with a starting score of "-1", and has been modded informative, but the positive moderation did not seem to add any points. I obviously don't understand the moderation system if this is possible. Does anybody know why an AC post could start with a negative score, or why positive moderation would have no benefit?
Slashdot Mirror
If you shouldn't sue, what should you do when someone bigger and stronger than you does something wrong to you? Law enforcement's not gonna help, they don't care about trivialities. Personally, I'm happy about this lawsuit, because it may serve as a reminder to Google not to go over the line when making private things public.
I'm sure there are circumstances where a student could be considered an educator (if they are a tutor, for instance).
I believe that if an employer pays an employee to produce a work, by convention, the employer owns the copyright. I'm really curious whether teaching falls under this scenario. It seems like at the very least, the student (the client, the one paying for a service) should be entitled to a non-exclusive right to use class materials (produced by the teacher for the class) for any purpose... but I really don't know. In this case, I wonder if the teacher sold or gave rights to multiple parties in a way he shouldn't have?
Why do you need to measure *across* the middle to measure the radius?
Is there a (theoretical) problem with using some kind of high tech space calipers to measure the radius without going anywhere near the 'middle'? You could, but the result wouldn't really be right. A black hole is like that blessed +2 bag of holding that has much more room inside it than the space that it actually encompasses. I never really studied general relativity, but I think that when an object is in a strong gravity field, it becomes shorter (or everything else becomes longer). This means that the notion of length gets a bit weird. Similarly, if you used calipers to measure the diameter of a block hole, the sides of the calipers would no longer be straight, as they got closer to the black hole, due to the way gravity bends space.
I hope I'm not totally wrong about this... I'm working from an analog of special relativity, which I did study a little...
They disabled right clicking in general. To rename a file, I have to do "file -> rename". There is no way to look at a folder's properties, because "file -> properties" is also disabled (so good luck freeing up disk on your network space when you can't see the folder sizes). Apparently, it's harder to mess up the computers without right clicking. These restrictions do not seem to apply to Firefox, Java, and some other non-Microsoft apps. Thank God they are written in a way that ignores stupid settings.
Thanks, I'll try that next time I'm in the lab.
These criticisms really just apply to design. For editing of something that already exists, I'm not sure photoshop has anything over the gimp. Also, the ability to script the gimp with scheme (or python, I think) is a big win--I've only used this once, but I would never have wanted to [resize, sharpen, adjust contrast] 600 images by hand!
This browser seems like the sort of thing that big companies might like to install on their workstations. After all, they don't care that much about usability (my university currently has right clicking disabled--there are quite a few things that are harder or impossible if you can't right click). I don't mean to say that this browser will be unusable--it's just that a corporation might sacrifice speed and flexibility for security. This browser might also be good for kiosks.
3. What is the false positive rate of such monitoring? Here, we have a cute example of a sick cat setting off a false positive. What about other incidents like this that fail to get into the newspaper? I'm not sure this matters. Are people's rights being trampled as a result of this monitoring? I'd feel more strongly about this story if there was mention of someone getting arrested, hassled, held, etc. On the other hand, if they detect cancer patients, they must pull people over pretty frequently, and the program may never catch a terrorist... well, good thing I'm not in politics.
To add to that, if you are following a pattern of "red blue blue" (the important part is that it has three steps), and you notice you are in some city, and three steps ago, you were at that same city, you can subtract 3*n steps off of the rest of the plan, because you know you will just cycle for that amount of time. So the plan won't necessarily be incredibly inefficient, because it can be intelligently pruned.
As for your second point, I agree that PHP is more suited for most web sites that Ruby. I would probably use Rails if (and only if) I had a web site in mind that was well suited to the "model view controller" idea.
But from reading your post, you have clearly never tried Ruby. You didn't criticize the right things
The basic idea is this: in Haskell (or most other functional languages), you know that different function calls will not interfere with each other (everything is thread safe out of the box), so they can be evaluated in parallel. Function evaluations can be parallelized with the infix operator par. The following evaluates "part1" and "part2" in parallel, before storing them together, as a pair:
let result = (part1 `par` part2) `seq` (part1,part2)
No locks, no writing explicitly threadsafe code. I'm sure there are other languages that are good for parallelism, Haskell just happens to be the one I'm learning.
Was anybody else really confused for a second when they read the headline "Linux X Windows"? What does this article have to do with X-Windows? Then I realized they meant "versus".
In all serious, is there any past evidence either way, that Microsoft would or would not respect a promise not to sue somebody for using their protocols/documentation/formats? Many companies use patents in two ways:
- Market fodder. (I.e., "our cool product has patents pending.")
- Defense, so that if somebody sues them, they could probably countersue.
Has Microsoft used patents offensively?
I absolutely agree with you--anybody who doesn't see microsoft innovation isn't looking in the right places. .NET and the idea of multiple languages being able to use the same libraries is very cool. Also see f#, a new functional language that microsoft research is creating. See also Haskell (a new favorite of mine), whose (possibly) most influential developer has been employed my microsoft research for ten years.
Even if windows vista is a flop, it does include innovative technologies. When is the last time that you shrunk a partition on the fly, while it was mounted? (Take that, partition magic.) I haven't used vista enough to name its other interesting features, but I'm sure it has them.
No, marketings purpose is simply to get you to buy a given product. Marketing is also intended to make you think about a brand or product, and this even works on cheap people like me. (I am almost never swayed to buy based on advertisements, because the thing being advertised is almost never the best price or value.) But even so, ads make a brand stick in my mind, and occasionally, in absence of all other information, I will buy the brand that I have heard of over the one that I haven't.
As for targeted vs. untargeted, I think I prefer targeted ads, because they are more likely to be somewhat entertaining. But any place that closely tracks my behavior for advertising purposes freaks me out. (amazon.com, I'm looking at you!)
Thanks for the link. I'll give it a try next time I need to get a document into Word format.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but the parent post perplexes me: at this time, the parent post is rated "-1", but with a starting score of "-1", and has been modded informative, but the positive moderation did not seem to add any points. I obviously don't understand the moderation system if this is possible. Does anybody know why an AC post could start with a negative score, or why positive moderation would have no benefit?