runningdogx

There is no place for humor or overly subjective terms like "evil" in a software license or other legal document, and the problem with Douglas Crockford's license is that he fails to understand that.

That is, unless his intent is to keep every entity with sane lawyers from using his software. I don't think that's his intent. He said he wants to keep people without a sense of humor from using his software, but sane lawyers with a good sense of humor will object to the license just as strongly as sane lawyers with no sense of humor.

Venue matters. A lawsuit based on the evil clause of the license, in San Francisco or Los Angeles, would probably go nowhere. However, consider a jury in Birmingham, AL, and whether they would find that using some of Crockford's software in an abortion clinic was a violation of the license.

This makes no sense. Is Stallman so focused on software that he isn't considering the implications of continuing to apply broken software patents to hardware?

FPGAs? Is an algorithm implemented on a FPGA a software or hardware implementation?

Sufficiently popular software algorithms like mpeg4 (including avc) are often implemented in ASICs for speed. Stallman's suggestion does nothing to help in those cases.

What if Intel introduces new instructions that assist with some patented algorithm but do not carry out the complete algorithm? Software completes the algorithm using the chip instruction. Is that covered under Stallman's software patent immunity proposal?

The dichotomy between software implementations and hardware implementations is unhelpful. If you oppose software patents on principle, whether because you think they're harmful or because you think they're math and are not supposed to be patentable in the first place, why let the camel's nose into the tent by campaigning to allow hardware (ASIC?) implementation patents, but not allowing pure-software implementations?

Perhaps this is better framed as an economic argument. If cost were no object, more algorithms would be implemented in ASICs. There's a limit to the total chip area you'd want to fit into a computer, but a lot of algorithms could be implemented in a few custom ASICs. It's likely that some of those algorithms would be covered by patents. Stallman's proposal seems like discrimination against algorithms that are important enough to make faster execution worth a lot of money.

If software patents are not valid, and I don't believe they are valid, then allowing them to apply to hardware implementations is just applying a band-aid and punting on the real issue. Stallman's proposal may be pragmatic, in that it reduces risk to most start-ups and other entities worried about violating patents in software, but it sustains the confusion about what software patents are and whether they can be valid. I think there's more at stake than the money at issue in patent lawsuits every year. I think broad appreciation of the value of open culture, and recognition that algorithms should be part of that, is worth more than any extra value companies might be able to extract from hardware implementations of patented algorithms due to artificial monopolies created by patent protection.

A very nice networking feature has landed in 3.5: CODEL AQM packet scheduler to fight bufferbloat. It is mainly relevant for routers.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2209336

With a modern pcre library version and nginx, instead of

    location ~ ^/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/ {
      set $username $1;

    location ~ ^/(?<username>[a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/ {

Yeah, I think me_myselft meant rights in terms of social justice, and not "fundamental rights" in the sense of abstract political philosophy. So many arguments get caught up over semantics and not what people are trying to say.

Government doesn't create the principles of nuclear physics that allow fission and fusion to occur.

We can't get rid of the nuclear threat as long as the knowledge of nuclear physics exists and someone somewhere wants to conquer the world (or merely a continent in some cases).

Software patents are a legal construct. Get rid of that, and writing up software patents accomplishes nothing.

This is another attempt at segmenting a market for goods depending on the price that can be extracted for that good in a particular market, while keeping the cheap versions from being marketable in countries with higher discretionary income. Somewhat similar to DVD region codes, except applied to books.

Publishers sell (or sell rights to sell) lower-quality texts abroad because they can make a profit. Then they get pissy when people resell those international editions in the U.S.

The market says that people want cheaper books and they don't care about colors or paper quality. Textbooks often end up mauled after a semester anyway. Publishers don't listen, people try to fill the void, and they get sued.

"While the written content of books for the domestic and international markets is often similar or identical, books intended for international markets can differ from the domestic version in design, supplemental content (such as accompanying CD–ROMS), and the type and quality of materials used for printing, including “thinner paper and different bindings, different cover and jacket designs, fewer internal ink colors, if any, [and] lower quality photographs and graphics." (from background in the 2nd circuit ruling)

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-2nd-circuit/1577369.html

Over-achievement also fits into the clueless tier. The clueless can't get rich or into upper management except by accident, but they can have successful careers as long as the psychopath upper tier sees them as useful.

In the GP corporate hierarchy, the losers tend to do the minimum required to keep their jobs. If they start making stuff work beyond their immediate job responsibilities, that's not classic loser behavior.

At one point in that series of essays, the author talks about behaviors of the psychopath. In a startup environment, the psychopath puts in a lot of effort and gets things done because that's the fastest path to getting the company off the ground.

I think Oracle has gone round the bend, but does the anti-Oracle view of APIs mean basically that all GPL software is LGPL?

When you call a function, why should that function's copyright status have any bearing on the copyright status of your function? Because they're in the same file? What is a file?

Maybe this will light a fire under the registrars and DNS hosting companies, because some of them still don't support IPv6 glue records (for registrars) or AAAA records (for DNS hosters).

http://www.sixxs.net/faq/dns/?faq=ipv6glue

Hint to law enforcement:

It doesn't matter whether copyright infringement is ethically good or bad. It doesn't matter whether these sites are legally liable for copyright infringement that goes on using them.

You look like complete morons trying to take down site after site. You are pissing people off and what do you have to show for it except a few hollow victories?

If copyright infringement through file sharing has decreased, it's due to itunes, amazon, google, and all the smaller companies offering digital versions of content. Guess who is missing from that list? MPAA and RIAA members.

Trying to fight copyright infringement through punitive fines or throwing people in prison is sick. It's like the drug war, only worse. At least you can point to a few crazy meth heads as a danger to the public. "Pirates" hurt... the meatspace content distributors that are rapidly becoming obsolete?

This is not about some new vulnerability. It is a survey of collected public keys. The main security-relevant conclusion is that some key generators are not using enough entropy.

Dr. Lenstra is a co-author of the paper (so it shouldn't be dismissed on the weakness of the reporting). The NY Times and Markoff should both be ashamed for publishing such a misleading article, particularly the title.

One aspect I've never thought about before is the selection of representatives for parliament/legislature. In the U.S., they're pre-selected in primary elections per party, but the national elections are single-winner per seat, so the candidates are out pandering to the voters constantly. I don't know percentages, but many other countries use multi-winner to select their national multi-seat bodies, and my understanding is that those would-be candidates aren't out campaigning, or at least not anywhere close to as visible as they are in the U.S. or the U.K. where there are direct single-winner elections for seats. As ideologically-driven as political parties are, maybe the parties still tend to select more rational, scientific-minded representatives when the would-be reps do not have a requirement to pander directly to the population prior to the election.

India (from wikipedia) also appears to have direct election of its parliament. India is fairly well known for its stifling bureaucracy. Is that coincidence, or the start of a pattern?

Maybe it's also in part due to other countries (those which aren't degenerate and corrupt enough that the government can fraudulently influence elections) knowing they're not the world's largest superpower, and knowing they can't afford to screw around as much.

I'd love to see the voting system changed to Range Voting (best overall?) or Condorcet (best ordering-based voting system?). For its discrimination against third parties, plurality voting is simply horrible, and IRV is nearly as bad[1]. I'll note that I don't think a voting system change alone will fix the American political system.

http://rangevoting.org, despite its nominal bias, is the best voting system resource anywhere.

[1] for instance: http://bolson.org/voting/irv/ IRV fails monotonicity, which IMO is a huge deal. http://rangevoting.org/Monotone.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS_frequency_bands#UMTS-FDD (scroll up slightly from there to see the five "major" UMTS bands identified.

NOTE: GSM/EDGE band support is different from UMTS band support. Except where explicitly stated, the rest of this is about UMTS bands.

Band IV is T-Mobile USA's high speed data band.

Bands II and V are AT&T's high speed data bands.

The Galaxy Nexus has bands I, II, IV, V, VIII http://www.phonearena.com/phones/Samsung-GALAXY-Nexus_id5595

iPhones (the GSM versions, not the Verizon versions) omit band IV, so they won't work on T-Mobile USA's UMTS data network.

T-mobile phones typically (and varyingly) omit bands II, V, and/or VIII.

I suggest searching phonearena for a handful of modern phones and comparing the supported GSM (& EDGE) bands (where most/all smartphones are quad-band) and UMTS bands (where supported bands are much more varying).

I've followed the discussion of the AF447 investigation on several flight discussion forums.

The PF (Bonin) apparently never became aware of his angle of attack (once the airplane fully stalled, AOA was absurdly high). He did not seem to be aware that his constant inputs had caused the Airbus's THS (trimmable horizontal stabilizer, horizontal flaps on the tail) to deflect to maximum in order to try to keep the nose up. Therefore when he tried to input stick up (nose down) several times briefly, and there was no obvious response (the computer takes a while to reduce THS elevation in response to opposing input), who knows what he thought -- maybe that all readings were incorrect.

Strangely, Bonin was the one pilot who had significant recent glider experience as I recall. The Airbus computer even in "alternate law" functions nothing like a glider (only "direct law" is sort of close to direct input), so maybe that further confused him.

In my opinion, at night, over an ocean, in a storm, with no visibility, in possibly significant turbulance, a modern aircraft cutting off Autopilot for any reason other than computer failure is completely unacceptable. A computer should be able to fly as well as a human under those circumstances.

People suggesting that on airliner forums get flamed. But it's true. Most pilots kept up the refrain that a computer cannot safely fly by gps and gyros unless they also have airspeed. Which is true. It's dangerous to fly if you don't have true airspeed (gyros and gps cannot accurate provide relative wind speed). However, if pitot tubes are frozen and the computer no longer has valid airspeed, the pilots no longer have valid airspeed either. Pitch and power is all they can do. The computer can do that just as well. All it needs to know is aircraft weight, which can be entered (maybe it is entered) before takeoff and automatically adjusted to account for fuel consumption.

There are a bunch of factors that contributed to the accident:

Pitots shouldn't have frozen.

Lack of Air France training for controlling an aircraft at altitude with the computer in "alternate law" (mode without full flight envelope protection; it's therefore possible to stall).

The command structure in the cockpit without the Captain (who had just gone on break) actually had Bonin in command, even though the co-pilot in the left seat outranked him... AF has since changed that. CRM (crew resource management) was poor; the co-pilot in the left seat didn't try to take control until way too late. The co-pilot was preoccupied with where the Captain was rather than offering constructive input on how to fly.

Bonin was not adequately aware of what his inputs were doing, or what the plane's Angle of Attack was, and did not react properly to the stall warning which in almost every case at high altitude means drop the nose, not raise it (though without valid airspeed there's a risk of overspeed which can cause a new set of problems).

The Airbus computers had some quirks; stall warnings stop if airspeed drops too low (due to some computer programming logic involving low airspeed, AOA sensors, and the result being silencing the stall warnings).

Nobody believed a passenger aircraft would be so stable during a full stall. This undoubtedly contributed to confusion about whether they were actually stalled. The Airbus's computer setting the trimmable horizontal stabilizer to max nose-up deflection, in response to Bonin's almost constant nose-up input, possibly contributed to the stability during stall.

Angle of Attack information may not have been adequately displayed to the PF (Bonin) -- the black box doesn't record data from the right set of instruments, so nobody knows what Bonin had on his screen.

There was poor notification on the co-pilot's side of what the PF (Bonin) was doing. Unlike traditional aircraft, it is not easy to see what the pilot in the other seat is doing with the stick.

There was poor notification on either side of the cockpit when the other pilot took control. When the co-pilot took control, Bonin almost immediately took control back, and it's not clear either of them knew what the other was trying to do. Apparently there's a light that indicates override, but who would notice such things under that amount of stress?

IOW, it was a disaster from top to bottom. Usually in aircraft accidents there's a chain of events, but in this case there were so many possible contributing causes that other than having better pitots that didn't freeze over, solving any one other problem may not have broken the chain.

(tl;dw for the video: it's about the dramatically improved detection of breast cancer particularly in dense breast tissue (where mammographies often fail to visibly differentiate tumors) by injecting a radiotracer and using small gamma detectors that can fit closely around the breast.)

There's also breast thermography.

http://www.iact-org.org/patients/breastthermography/what-is-...

And another technique I couldn't find a description of but I read about a while ago, where the breast temperature is altered first. Since tumors have greater blood supply, it makes breast thermography (or something like it... I forget the exact detection method) even more accurate in detecting cancer, since a tumor with greater blood supply will return to normal temperature faster than the surrounding tissue.

Could google vary the crawling rate on each site and see what effects that has on response times, and develop an algorithm to adjust crawl speed so as not to affect site performance too much? If google starts crawling a site and notices sequential crawl requests are answered in .5s w/ .1s stddev and it starts crawling with 10 parallel connections and the answers are 2s w/ 1s stddev, clearly that's a problem because user experience for real people will be impacted. Maybe google could automatically email webmaster@ and notify them of performance issues it sees when crawling.

Another thing that might help google is for them to announce and support some meta tag that would allow site owners (or web app devs) to declare how likely a page is to change in the future. Google could store that with the page metadata and when crawling a site for updates, particularly when rate limited via webmaster tools, it could first crawl those pages most likely to have changed. Forum/discussion sites could add the meta tags to older threads (particularly once they're no longer open for comments) announcing to google that those thread pages are unlikely to change in the future. For sites with lots of old threads (or lots of pages generated from data stored in a DB and not all of which can be cached), that sort of feature would help the site during google crawls and would help google keep more recent pages up to date without crawling entire sites.

By casual observation, probably 90% or more of the driving population violates speed laws regularly; only the people who exceed the limit by 10-15mph or more, or who get caught in small town speed traps, get ticketed for it.

Why do you consider crime rates of more serious crimes, yet instead of counting the number of road speed law violators, you count only the number of citations for speeding? Like drug possession laws, road speed law enforcement is highly selective. You can't get a picture of overall criminality by measuring arrest and citation rates.

How fast would speed limits change if automated detection led to automatic fines for any speeding? We're already close; the only reason it hasn't been implemented is that everyone knows it would upend traffic speed laws through public outrage. (I realize there's the theoretical legal problem of identifying the driver, but that hasn't stopped many locales from using red light and speeding cameras and holding the registered owner responsible for fines.)

The Asus Transformer Prime might be disqualified because it's not chromeos and it doesn't have a built in hardware keyboard, but it's a quad-core tegra tablet running gingerbread and soon ICS (keyboard optional).

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/09/transformer-prime-detaile...

I don't have a chromebook but I'm not sure what chromeos offers that android doesn't.

I didn't know what skyrim was, beyond a vague awareness that it was a game, so I went to elderscrolls.com, only to encounter a flash-wrapped video with no volume control.

I see this particular usability faux pas way too often. If you roll your own flash video player rather than host videos elsewhere or use one of the mainstream well-designed open/commercial flash video player apps, let viewers control the volume.

Binary On/Off sound toggles on flash apps are ridiculous. Furthermore, a custom flash video player app should remember the volume setting (per-domain) so viewers don't have to monkey with the volume every time that flash app appears.

The capsule could have been from some industrial entity that should have protected the capsule until it was handed off to a recycler (one who knew what they were getting), but didn't (maybe to cut disposal costs, or by accident/laziness). Someone could then have sold the capsule to a Saudi Arabian scrapyard, and they packed it into a container to be melted down in Italy.

Another historical radiation incident caused by failure to protect a radiation source from scrap thieves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident

If those thieves in the Goiania incident had just sold the the Cs source to a scrapyard immediately without breaking it open first, the two incidents might have been similar.

I absolutely hate that.

Google needs to introduce a www.google.com/adv interface that doesn't respond, "I think you meant salt water, Dave," when you query for [sat water].

  http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=firefox+7&b2=chrome+16
  https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3251
  http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606

Fell out of usage with the advent of industrial printing presses, it looks like?

Still no native epub support. What is Amazon waiting for?

Sort of. I sleep for 9 hours if I've been up for more than about 14 hours prior and there's no alarm. If I've been awake for more than 24 hours it goes up to 12hrs.

If I've had several drinks (alcohol), I never sleep for 9 hrs, it's always less, but I haven't tracked post-alcohol sleep times closely enough to notice if it's still a multiple of 3.

However, I can also do 6 hrs or 3 hrs, and I don't feel groggy but I'll get tired sooner the next night. Not adhering to a multiple of 3 hrs (rem cycles I assume), or reasonably close to that, ends up badly.

What I really need is an alarm hooked up to a primitive EEG so that it can start the clock when I fall asleep, and set off an alarm after a programmable number of minutes. That way I could sleep for 6 hrs without ever being groggy. But even the cheapest EEG stuff I've seen connectable to a computer is not cheap.

$13 isn't a lot to pay. However, if it takes an hour to save and itemize out of state invoices, in order to pay taxes on them, I'm going to guess that's less than you make per hour, so the entire exercise represents a net loss (other than the benefit to your conscience).

Many people spend way more on out-of-state purchases, so their sales tax bill would be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. There's real incentive not to pay, unless you're itemizing those purchases as deductions on your income tax or unless you're making the purchases as an incorporated entity.

People get audited on their income taxes all the time. Businesses get audited. I have never heard of an individual getting audited for failure to pay state use tax on out-of-state purchases when they didn't declare those purchases on any official forms.

A few states don't even have income tax; in those states there are no state tax forms that the average citizen ever encounters.

On one thing we agree. There is rarely if ever a place for calculators when doing real math, for which I have a healthy interest and appreciation. But that's not because advanced calculators offer an advantage; rather, it's because they are usually irrelevant and at best only marginally helpful in the construction of proofs.

However, as you say from your educational experience, calculators can simply be banned on any lower math exams where they're inappropriate, or the exams can often be designed so that the calculators, even with CAS and equation solving capability, offer no meaningful help.

Like I said, if advanced functionality is not needed or wanted, a vastly cheaper HP 300s or TI 34 today would be more than adequate.

My point is that students are not going to spend $100 on a non-graphing calculator, and professionals are either going to want a 50g for its substantially improved capabilities, or will not be using a calculator much to begin with.

So that leaves me concluding that 15c limited edition buyers will be professionals with nostalgia for the 15c but little use for calculators these days.

My enthusiasm for graphing calculators (specifically, rpn stack-based graphing calculators) has little to do with graphing, and nothing to do with equation solving or CAS (neither of which I used much on my graphing calculators), but rather simply this: Take the 15c, give it a better display, increase the stack size from 4 to a lot, and make the last few stack levels visible at all times. That's what an RPN graphing calculator gives you, and that's what's worth $100.

With a one-line segmented lcd display, I wouldn't care that it's flashable even if it ran linux. There's no way I'd get one.

The 12c I can somewhat understand. It has a niche; it's accepted on a bunch of financial-related exams where other more advanced calculators are banned, and many financial geeks can operate it instinctively. Common Finance operations accessible with one or two keystrokes, combined with RPN, make it invaluable even though modern calculators are far more expandable and capable than the 12c.

However, I see no place for the 15c. You could buy a HP 50g on amazon for the cost ($100) of the limited edition 15c.

In testing situations where the 50g is not allowed, there will be no need for numerical integration or matrix manipulation, so a cheap calculator like a HP 300s or TI 34 would be perfectly adequate at a small fraction of the cost.

Really? I think the n-spires are going in the wrong direction for post-academic users, trying to approach the input (full alphabetic keyboard) and UI of a computer on a severely size-constrained piece of hardware, rather than focusing on what I think stand-alone calculators should be about: an easily manipulated tool for back of the envelope calculations and first-try graphing of equations. By allowing easily accessible alphabetic entry, it makes typing in complex equations easier, but anyone who is not constrained by academic requirements will be using matlab/R/mathematica/etc. for that, rather than trying to type using a small non-qwerty keypad, and getting results on a too-small screen.

I understand the logic of something like the n-spire for academics (though I'd prefer an HP 50g): get a piece of hardware that can do enough math for testing purposes, but limited in usability and/or IO, to hopefully reduce cheating, and have students use it in class and for homework so they are familiar with it by the time they have to use it on a test. However, it's sad that an entire industry (calculator hardware) requires poor and time-wasting data and formula entry characteristics (mostly based on required form factor) simply to avoid having students cheat on tests (both in-classroom and standardized tests).

How much time and effort would be saved if students could use smartphones or tablets with a customizable calculator UI? Calculators' limited screen size, inflexible input, and limited market size compared to smartphones/tablets ensures they will remain hamstrung.

And TI still hasn't gotten it through their heads that RPN should be a basic supported calculator mode, not left to a 3rd party to implement as an optional program.

Disclosure: I grew up with a TI 30+, 34, 68, 81, 83+, and then a HP 48gx -- which got me through most of HS and college, hence my strong preference for RPN. My HP48 broke (screen damage, no fault of HP's) and I never replaced it. I've used a calculator probably a single-digit number of times since then.