This is an example of why using (or, at least, relying on - which in practice is the same thing) actual data as primary keys is a bad idea. Even if there data contains something which is supposed to be guaranteed unique and is theoretically never supposed to change, you should generate an arbitrary unique key and use that as the primary ID; that avoids so many potential pitfalls from use cases, such as this one, which weren't thought of in advance.
Care to read what RMS says [fsf.org] on the subject? He says he specifically put in the "anti-TiVo" clause because while you can get the source code you can NOT run it on the TiVo.
Yes, exactly.
The entire point of the GPL is to make sure that people can edit the software they use (refer back to the semi-famous "RMS and a bad printer driver" story), or more particularly, to guarantee them some basic freedoms about what they can do with that software. If, after editing, they can't use it anymore, then that's a problem.
What those edits involve has absolutely no bearing on that central point.
If TiVo didn't want to have people able to edit the code running on the TiVo unit, they shouldn't have released it under the GPL - including, if necessary, not re-using already-GPLed code from other people. They discovered a loophole by which they could fulfill the letter of the GPL but not its intent or spirit - allow people to edit the code, but not run it. RMS quite naturally wanted to close that loophole, to prevent them or others from doing the same thing in the future; the GPLv3 was his way of doing so.
(And no, "but you *can* edit it, you just can't run it afterwards" doesn't fly - because at that point, you're no longer editing the code you *are* running, you're editing code you *aren't* running and never will be able to run.)
How does XKCD work as a book? Half of the joke is only seen when you hover over the cartoon.
According to the NYT article which is the (real) FA, the mouse-over text will appear in fine print in place of the traditional print comic's "copyright someone-or-another YYYY-MM-DD" string.
This does, apparently, also mean that the book itself is being released without copyright, though exact details weren't provided.
If that happens way more than people realize, then people are unaware of these sites. If people are unaware of these sites, then they don't visit them, in which case they cannot be competition to the AP.
Not necessarily.
In order for someone to realize that that has happened, they need to both see the story on the blog and see the story attributed to the AP. I don't find it particularly implausible that many or most people reading such a blog might not read the AP directly; I'm not positive I've ever read a story directly from the AP, as opposed to a citation of an AP story by someone else. (A case where their prominence works against them; many people (and more news organizations) cite AP reports in their own stories, but few people - other than those doing the citing - seem to feel the need to read the originals.)
If most people see the story in only one place, then most people won't realize that the story is being copied wholesale. If the one place where they see the story is the AP and they don't visit the blogs, that's fine; if the one place where they see the story is the blog and they don't visit the AP, then that's not so fine. The argument would be that the latter is what is happening.
According to TFA, the blue tint disappeared within a week, and the regained mobility didn't manifest till the sixth week (at which point they killed the rat to dissect it) - so I doubt that this will be a long-term problem.
They did mention that they were surprised, upon dissection, to find out that the spinal cord was still blue even at the six-week mark. I imagine that even that would go away with time, though.
But as far as I've ever seen, PowerShell doesn't come "set up and ready to go" on a new Windows install; you have to go out and get (and install) it yourself. (Thus, "Windows doesn't
Combined with the near total lack of publicity and marketing for PowerShell, that means the vast majority of normal users will never even realize it exists, much less make use of it. It also means that people writing scripts to run on Windows can't rely on its being available for any given machine, whereas they can be quite certain that a POSIX-compatible shell (and, very probably, bash itself) will be available on any *nix machine.
Combined, these two points mean PowerShell verges on being useless for most purposes. If it were near-universally installed, that would be different; however, since it isn't, it might as well not exist.
You know what I want? A tag based filesystem. WTF should I have to manage directories?
Interesting you should mention that on this particular story.
I no longer use Gmail's Web interface, but last I heard, they had pretty much ignored the concept of folders/directories per se, choosing instead to present "views" (not their term, IIRC) based on user-defined searches. (This leads to annoyances such as their refusal to store more than one copy of a message, as determined by Message-ID, but that's another topic.) I remember having also been able to tag messages explicitly as one thing or another, and do so in an automatic fashion based on pattern-matching rules; having done so, you can then define a "view" for all messages with that tag.
I don't like Gmail's interface, for various reasons, but this underlying idea is interesting; it looks like much the same type of thing you're asking for, and I think it's the first "live" implementation of something like that I've ever come across.
I don't know if they've implemented this same kind of taggability and "view"ability for Google Apps documents (I don't use that service at all), but it wouldn't surprise me if it were possible.
Furthermore, given the recently-reported upcoming "Chrome OS", it's not impossible that you'll see something resembling a filesystem with this capability before terribly long...
What? You can't do this in Linux? The uber powerful everybody should switch right away it's 100 times better and more powerful for the elite powerful power user of power Linux that I'm always hearing about?
Depends on what file-selection widget the program is using.
The default GTK (and, therefore, Gnome) widget couldn't do that last I looked, no.
It's rarely been something I even notice, however, given that almost all file interaction is done on the command line; I can only think of twice I've even wanted to do this under Linux.
If you think it's that important, however, I doubt it would be that difficult to add... (Assuming you could grok GTK well enough, of course, which is far from a given.)
I don't have any toys, you insensitive clod!
And since you are using MySQL all your referential management is done in code (phone table should have person's id column as a foreign key from persons table, for instance).
...are you saying that MySQL doesn't support foreign key constraints?
News to me; I created a database with about as many of them as I have tables just a couple of months ago, and mysql 5.0.3.2 accepted that just fine.
If that's not what you're saying, I'm not sure what you are trying to get at.
No.
Like so much else in life, there is Good, Fast, and Cheap. You can only have two of the three.
I liked Giganews when I read Usenet. They're good, and fast.
Eh? By my assessment back when I subscribed to Giganews - after Comcast dropped their Usenet access, which itself was subcontracted through Giganews - they're actually quite cheap, especially for what you get. (Even the bottommost price tier includes full binaries access under a bandwidth cap high enough to be completely ignored for casual use, and all tiers have retention so high as to be ridiculous - I believe there were literally three years of old posts in the text groups when I went to clear out the backlog to catch up again to where I had been.)
I'll admit that that's only if you want binaries access. If text-only is fine for you, then there are much cheaper providers out there. Even for text, however, I doubt that anything out there (except arguably Google Groups, which should be disqualified for other reasons) comes remotely close to Giganews on retention time.
I have four living grandparents non of which own or use a computer much less the internet. While you may claim that it benefits them in some way, they don't give a damn.
And they wouldn't be taxed, because they don't use a computer.
From TFA:
suppose that if I had a choice between living in a world where all 100 million other Internet users in the US had no anti-virus software installed (using round numbers to make things simpler)
The 100 million being discussed is only people who are Internet users, not "the entire population of the USA" (I think that's closer to 300 million by now, actually). Since your grandparents don't use the Internet, they wouldn't be included in that count, and so wouldn't be obligated to pay the tax.
(Two weeks late! Whee! At least I'm not jumping into that 'definition of libertarianism' thread...)
I decided the question related to "restarts" not "shut downs," as in "how often do you have to stop what you're doing and reboot when you'd rather not."
Then, I'm sorry, but you interpreted it wrong.
This sort of poll is unmistakably aimed at people who keep track of, and take pride in, their system uptime - people in whose circles a respectable uptime is measured in nothing less than months.
A "reboot", for the purpose of this type of poll, is any time you voluntarily turn your computer off - or, by some standards, perhaps even non-voluntarily. The important factor is how long the computer remains on and running in between times of not doing so.
If you turn your computer off voluntarily, for anything other than exceptional reason (e.g. kernel updates, hardware changes, et cetera), then you are almost certainly not the type of person at whom the question is aimed. That doesn't mean you get to count your voluntary shutdowns as not being a reboot for the purposes of this type of poll.
You are, of course, still entirely free to think that people who are ashamed to report an uptime of less than three months are idiots - just as they are free to boggle at the notion that a computer person would willingly shut their computer down when they didn't need to.
Sure.
Now imagine how much more of a load running that many instances of e.g. WoW on that server would have involved.
And surely you don't think a full compile of WoW (by whomever actually has access to do that) is a resource-light endeavour?
Running Nethack or another roguelike can take up resources, yes - but not to nearly the extent that a more modern graphical game would.
Force needed to accelerate 2.2lbs of cookies = 1 Fig-newton to 1 meter per second
