465. Anonymous (1cust189.tnt2.hackensack.nj.da.uu.net) –
24 Apr 2003 12:57:28
[ FLAMING TEXT ]
HolLa At YoUr GiRl!! My AIM S/N is xxbabydoll974xx. I'm only 14 so if ur old don't send me a message.. ThANk YoU |
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Jace: Well, sure, I consider it success inasmuch as I managed to stave off the lawyers (AFAIK) without incurring any monetary loss, managed to get them a lot of bad publicity without basically doing anything except writing them a few letters and talking to some reporters, and never took down or modified my software. I think it also raised some awareness about the DMCA in the font community (which is good--it shouldn't just be slashdot kids that hate that law, since it affects many of us in many ways), and maybe even taught some folks about font embedding.
Hopefully, the most important thing is that others who are threatened with similar letters realize that a cogent and rational response goes a long way towards maintaining our freedom. I don't believe the DMCA applies in my case, but even if it did, making it costly (in terms of lawyer money and bad publicity) to try to enforce could make corporations think twice about whipping it out in these trivial circumstances.
Major Tom: Thanks! I'm glad you found it useful! |
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463. Tom 7 (gs82.sp.cs.cmu.edu) –
23 Apr 2003 15:28:22
[ Quake 3 Done! ]
Xaero is hard to take head-on in hardcore and nightmare. In hardcore, you have to be stealthy; just hide behind pillars and nail him with rockets when he comes to try to find you. In nightmare, you pretty much have to trick him into killing himself, which is what I did. Try Q3DM18... that one took me days and days to beat. |
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462. Sarge (65.121.125.172) –
23 Apr 2003 13:00:17
[ Quake 3 Done! ]
nightmare is tough but i have been playing for 8 days off and on and now only have 7 left to go on nightmare. but the only one i cant beat on hardcore is zero. i really have trouble. i can kill him a lot like 9-3 until he got the rail gun thats when he knocked me off the platform
while i was tring to get health and then everything started to fll apart. every time i shot him he could shoot me twice and the battle ended 3-10 ouch!!! |
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Well, probably you got from my scare quotes that I "support the troops" in the sense that war nay-sayers feel they have to in order to avoid the ire of veterans associations and parents of soldiers and so on. In a sense I do support them (much more than, say, I "supported" the president after September 2001), because for the most part they're probably just naive kids, and they don't play a role in deciding whether to invade or not. But I don't support the invasion of Iraq, killing starving kids, or freedom fries.
That doesn't mean we can't find humor in the situation. And you must admit that this guy being the official "information" minister casts an interesting orwellian perspective on the Iraqi government -- if I were an Iraqi citizen, I would certainly want people pointing out what a joke their "press" is.
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Well, the number can never be computed regardless of how good our ability to solve limited-state turing machines is, but as you say it may be possible to approximate it. It's easy to make numbers that are not even approximatable, like the probability that any turing machine chosen randomly (not that I believe uniform randomness over an infinite set, anyway) will halt.
There's no need to hate numbers! Just believe in what you want to believe in, and think of the rest as just symbol manipulation. |
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Yeah, me too. I support the people who left their country, flew to another, invaded it, and killed lots of people that weren't saddam. What brave young men and women, dropping bombs on a 3rd world city full of starving kids. Lets all make jokes about the iraqi information minister. Ha! Nothing wrong here! Funny! Jokes! *sigh* |
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Tom,
I'm a developer myself, and got really pissed off when I realised that Fontographer made the fonts "un-embedable" by default. Your program was a complete life-saver when I had to process a pile of military map marking symbol fonts at short notice...
Many thanks, and don't let the bastards grind you down...
Major Tom Mouat MBE
www.mapsymbs.com |
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"The determination of whether a Turing machine will come to a halt given a particular input program. The halting problem is solvable for machines with less than four states. However, the four-state case is open, and the five-state case is almost certainly unsolvable due to the fact that it includes machines iterating Collatz-like congruential functions, and such specific problems are currently open. The problem of whether a general Turing machine halts is undecidable, as first proved by Turing (Wolfram 2002, pp. 1137-1138)"
...
So, the kind of number you described, may one day be computable, assumed that the N-state case has been solved (with N=the highest state among the infinite programs making up your number).
A (subtler?) easiest, and certainly never computable example may be:
0.XY
where X=1 if Y=0
and Y=1 if X=0
This is a case I've been thinking to some time ago, criticizing the existance of certains real numbers exactly the way you did. Such a question was brought up, I believe, while writing a function that built numbers like this:
f(N)=0.XAYBCD
So that X = first prime factor and A = power
Y = second prime factor and B = power
and so on.
Bah. I hate numbers. |
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455. Jace, Danielsville, PA, The Corporate... (cache-2.atw.pa.webcache.rcn.net) –
17 Apr 2003 04:07:49
[ UPD: Embed / DMCA threats ]
Can you consider this a success? It would seem almost disappointing if there were no articles in the mags and on the sites that said "Harmless developer wins argument against bullying Agfa Lawyers. Bullies wrong." I mean, no closure and all...
Anyway.... Your site has entertained me for well over two hours now, and your fonts are awesome. I plan to download them next. I have no use for the tool you wrote to modify that bit, but if I made fonts, you can bet that I'd have to use it, considering the tools default the bit to disable embedding. It would piss me off to have to open them all again to make such a stupid change after I had forgotten to change it myself on each one.
Want me to compile the code for BeOS and upload it to BeBits.com? ;-)
DMCA and UCITA should go down in history as illegal laws that were created for the sole benefit of corporations; such laws make what would otherwise already be illegal activities for the computer industry companies into legal, defendable activities. As such, giving them power to abuse the people they are supposed to provide for (their customers and consumers). In America, the customer is now an undesirable and unavoidable side-effect to acquiring money. If corporate leaders could leave out the step where you actually purchase goods or services from them and just enact a law that taxes everyone 50% of their income directly, they'd do it.
Something needs to stop the pendulum from swinging any further in this direction. The USA is very quickly becoming the land of corporate rule. Wait, it already is. We have a CEO, not a President. Government for the corporations, by the corporations.
We have to fight for our rights or we all lose them. The problem is, people like you and I don't have millions of dollars with which to fight for our rights. |
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Well, classical mathematicians think of all real numbers (meaning an infinite sequence of digits after the decimal place) as existing, but you can "define" real numbers that are impossible to compute.
For instance, you can give each of the infinite number of computer programs (or turing machine) a unique number. Then, you can define the real number to be:
0.d1 d2 d3 d4 d5 ...
where d1 = 1 if the 1st computer program halts, or 0 otherwise.
Since it's undecidable whether a computer program will halt or not (search for "halting problem" on google), it's impossible to know what some of the digits of this number are.
If you can define something but never compute what it is, in what sense does that thing exist? So I refuse the existence of non-computable reals, and instead only worry about the subset that is computable. (You can think of these as infinite sequences of converging rationals, or computer programs that can produce number to an arbitrary precision.)
Interestingly, the computable reals are in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, because their identity is the program that computes them. (As opposed to the "real" numbers which are proved to be bigger by diagonalization). On the other hand, testing equality of two computable reals is itself undecidable.
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Hee! Tell me, tell me more |
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I'm down with "refuse real numbers" but for different reasons. ;) |
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450. Anonymous (62.254.168.197) –
10 Apr 2003 05:01:35
[ FLAMING TEXT ]
Knifo woz ere wiv waz chillin 2003 |
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449. Anonymous (62.254.168.197) –
10 Apr 2003 05:01:05
[ FLAMING TEXT ]
u wanna get down ;) |
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448. Anonymous (62.254.168.197) –
10 Apr 2003 05:00:21
[ FLAMING TEXT ]
hey this site cant help wiv shit hellooo Ladieeess |
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Ahem, "Anonymous" being me, FARINA00. Hooray. |
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I wish you could read italian. Maybe an automatic translator could help you reading this
http://www.lalista.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 |
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You'll have to work on your freestyle mathematics in preparation... |
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Aww jeez, I never knew court was so hilarious. Now I wanna get called for jury duty... |
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I think you should use it to hold up a CD burner on your desk...
or something. |
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Doesn't matter! Plexiglass is small and mine, not for anyone else! |
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441. DoArMa (dvpt11-235.cot.brightok.net) –
20 Mar 2003 16:19:20
[ Free Plexiglass! ]
What size is the plexiglass?
doarma@yahoo.com |
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Yeah, you did. That's all of 3rd Earth. |
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