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He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Taken from The Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 1743-1826 NO PATENTS ON IDEAS

You could play snakes at waterloo station over 3 years ago.

Apaarently up for 1.5 years.

Written by this dude: (only link I could find)
http://rugmd4.chem.rug.nl/hoesel/

Okay, a troll like this deserves a reply.

I'm not a woman either,

Of course not; women aren't as lazy as what you go on to describe:
...but I _don't_ want to fix my own car, TV, washing machine, etc. If you're the kind of person who'd ask for that: I don't want to fix _yours_ either. (And since the topic does mention OSS, I'll do the horribly non-slashdot thing and say: I don't want to fix your code either.)

Err... personal attack. First mark of a quality troll.

The whole closed economy idea where you do everything by yourself went out of fashion a century ago. In fact, debatably it was slowly going out of fashion already around the year 8000 BC. People were already divided into people who can plough the fields, people who can build a fortress, people who know how to operate the water supply, people who can make or fix a bronze spear, people who can fight, etc.

Actually, the so-called "early Bronze age" in Europe began ~3000-2500 BC, so your "people who can make or fix a bronze spear" is an anachronism by more than 5 thousand years. If we're going to completely ignore the course of history, we replace that with "the people who can make or fix a fuel injector." That would sound more impressive, don't you think?

Why? Because it's more efficient that way. So you might as well grow out of being the alpha caveman, and finally get on with living in the 21'st century. The idea nowadays is: specialization. Live with it.

Err... this guy was talking about automobiles. My recollection is that cavemen did not have automobiles. Oh, wait, sorry... forgot about the previous point, we've decided that we had fuel injectors 10,000 years ago.

You're going to do... what? Spend 20+ hours a month tweaking and fumbling on that stupid car engine (actually even more for some people), to avoid paying 50$ to a qualified mechanic? Unless you're paid less than 2.5$ per hour, does it even count as saving anything? Either way, I don't know about you, but my time is more valuable than that.

Okay, hate to nitpick, but in the US, the convention is to write the monetary symbol immediately before the number. (Except for cents, of course.) So, fifty dollars is written $50. Oh, I should also mention that the fractional dollar amounts are, by convention, always written with two decimal places, so two dollars and fifty cents is written $2.50.

Also, most repairs one can do without a lot of extra equipment don't take very long. I can change an air filter, for example, in less than 5 minutes, change spark plugs in less than an hour... and I really don't know much about cars. Not to say that it wouldn't take you 20 or more hours to do these things, but most people I know really are much faster than that.

The whole thing is often just a sad exercise in trying to look macho. In which case, you can step outside the whole "Real Men (TM) fix their own car" stupidity for a change. In fact, step outside the whole idea that you have to prove your manhood/mad skillz/whatever to anyone.

Ahem... apparently you never heard that "every man ought to be a macho, macho man". This point doesn't lend verisimilitude to your first assertion that you are not a woman.

Do something better with your time. Read a book. Watch a movie. Or do a couple of hours overtime to pay for that car repair, and you'll still have a lot more time left than if you fixed everything yourself.

Watching a movie is "something better" than fixing your car? Let us return to the point about dollars per hour. How much value do you anticipate people would gain from watching a movie? Are you saying this is more than they gain from the experience of learning something of how an automobile works and fixing their cars?

I can almost hear some people's Pavlov reflex going "waah, but if I don't fix my own computer/car/whatever _and_ those of every single neighbour, t

How about going right to the source of American patent law?

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. -Thomas Jefferson

No Patents on Ideas

KFG

It wants its stuff back.

In ~1995 there was a game called "Lumbus" for SGI Indy's, where user input was provided through IndyCam. It needed perfect lighting though...

Here is some information.

Well, for example, there is no concept of "fair use" of property. Portions of works that are under copyright can be reproduced for educational or critical purposes. There is no parallel in property law. (Imagine a college professor taking over a room of your house to teach a class.)

The framers understood that ideas are different than property and should be treated as such. Here's a relevant excerpt from one of Thomas Jefferson's letters on the subject:

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

> There are yet more problems with nuclear power. Think of the trouble the world is in over oil. Uranium will be no different. If you base the world's energy needs on a scarce resource

This is the first thing I thought of. There is not an infinite supply of Uranium, I remember reading that in documents describing how much estimated total power was available from non-renewable resources in the 90's. IIRC (and I probably do not) it was something like 50-100 years for oil, 100 years for nuclear, and 2-400 for coal.

The very first hit in this google search turns up a pdf paper that claims that if we used Nuclear for all our current electricity needs, that we'd run through all known Uranium reserves in 3 years.

Of course the source is apparently very anti-nuclear, but at least they are publicly publishing their calculations and refutations. http://beheer.oprit.rug.nl/deenen/

Look mom, I even got the funky capitalization right!

I know a guy who had a good experience using PDFLaTeX with pretty much the same method you are using. I think he did some of his figures as eps and others as png. PDFLaTeX allowed for the hyperlinks that the LaTeX -> ps -> pdf method won't get you. I found a pretty good summary here. Might be good if you're already familiar with LaTeX.

Someone I know has built something to create genetic art via postscript. Here:

In Holland someone sued M$ Netherlands for this commercial. You can read it in this article (dutch). M$ lost the case, so sue them in all countries! :-)

I always seem to get them mixed up with other electrons. I should find a way to put sticky labels on them or something.

In fact, some people have suggested to the company that they work for, that in view of how i makes the vast percentage of its revenue charging for configuring, setting up and maintaining the software they develop, that it might be worth it to open source the product and give the software away, but charge for everything else. So if you're really broke you can get it for free, or if you want to look at it before putting it on your machines, you can do that. But if you want anything else, even instructions on how to install or use it, you have to pay something.

Why is this such a problem for you? Is it that you think they should give everything away? They have to eat, too. If you don't like it, don't agree to their terms. Since the source code is available without restrictions, take the time and effort to study the code and learn how it works, pay someone else to do that, or pay them and/or agree to their restrictions.

Has anyone noticed there are no open-source tax preparation or payroll software programs? (If I am wrong, someone e-mail me). Because those aren't very sexy for programmers to work with - which means that people aren't volunteering to do them for free - and because they require constant maintenance. (Not [merely] because of bugs, but because the tax laws and payroll processing rules change every year.)

Someone has to pay for the maintenance since this is not something your average programmer either wants to do for free (in the case of a payroll product) or has the resources to do on his own (in the case of a tax preparation program.)

Now, I know that there is GNU Cash as a workalike for Quicken but I know of no open-source software for mundane apps like payroll or tax preparation, and if there were, I can't see how we could expect them to be kept up to date without significant resources to handle the average of 10,000 tax law changes yearly. And that's just the U.S.

Every country has its own rules and thus a tax package to handle the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules would be worthless for Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA) or for the UK's Inland Revenue (IR). Or the other tax authorities in the other 160+ jurisdictions around the world, almost all collecting some form of income tax. Then there's the 30+ states in the U.S. that also impose taxes on income, provinces in Canada (if they do, I'm not sure) and other subdivisions of governments elsewhere.

Now, some of these agencies are providing on-line tax preparation over their websites, but the method to do this is not open source, and would you expect to pay the lowest possible tax by using, or would you really want to trust, a tax package developed by the taxing authority? :)

Historical note: the typical quote "The power to tax is the power to destroy" was originally written by U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall as "That the power of taxing by the States may be exercised so as to destroy..." McCulloch v. Maryland 4 Wheat. 316 (1819), the first case declaring a statute void for violating the constitution.

Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
http://paul.washington.dc.us

> That's fundamentally the problem with the open source community. By and large, they're more interested in stealing other people's ideas ...

Oh please, Open Source is not the only community that copies other people's ideas. Games (Closed source I might add) for the past 20 years have done so as well. Guess you never heard the old adage: Imitation is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery.

How exactly do you *steal* an idea? Do you mean copying without crediting the source?

I believe Jefferson said it best:

"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. ... He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
-- The Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 1743-1826


Cheers

--
Philosophy is a game with objectives but no rules.
Mathematics is a game with rules but no objectives.
- Unknown

or here, if you don't want to have to download proprietary rubbish just to look at some ascii characters!

After all, when you are a second-class citizen, you have NO rights at all, never mind a curtailment of your freedom of speech!

What is currently being set up in the United States is a new class system, in which some people have more rights than others. DRM is part of it, but it isn't all of it. The main thing I see is an attempt to set up a society in which insiders will maintain control of the majority of the wealth and outsiders will not be able to topple them. The insiders consist of a class of people who move between the halls of Congress and the top levels of major American corporations, the outsiders are everyone else. This type of plutocracy has existed in the past in many parts of the world, and it always has disasterous results. As has been noted many times, it is a major feature of colonialism. Both the first wave which brought about the American revolution and the later wave for which brought about the Indian independance movement that Gandhi was a famous leader of.

These revolutionary movements were primarily aligned against economic concerns. That's what the British East India Tea Company was about. The preferential treatment of the British East India Tea Company by the British government was a major factor in sparking the American revolution. (I can just see Slashdot circa 177X, "I can't believe that you are getting upset about something as trivial as a tea monoply when there are som many more serious injustices in the world, have some sense of proportion!!") Of course, later the British East India Company was to turn to the opium trade to expand its interests in China. This opium trade was used as an excuse to sieze parts of China for the British Empire.

Mr. Wells, in his "Middle Kingdom" describes the origin of this first war with England: "This war was extraordinary in its origin as growing chiefly out of a commercial misunderstanding; remarkable in its course as being waged between strength and weakness, conscious superiority and ignorant pride; melancholy in its end as forcing the weaker to pay for opium within its borders against all its laws, thus paralyzing the little moral power its feeble government could exert to protect its subjects. . . . It was a turning point in the national life of the Chinese race, but the compulsory payment of six million dollars for the opium destroyed has left a stigma upon the English name."

He also says, "The conflict was now fairly begun; its issue between the parties so unequally matched --one having almost nothing but the right on its side, the other assisted by every material and physical advantage-could easily be foreseen" and again, after speaking of it as being unjust and immoral, he concludes "Great Britain, the first Christian power, really waged this war against the pagan monarch who had only endeavored to put down a vice harmful to his people. The war was looked upon in this light by the Chinese; it will always be so looked upon by the candid historian, and known as the Opium War."

Within fifteen years after this first war, there was another one, and again Great Britain came off victorious. China had to pay another indemnity, three million dollars, and five more treaty ports were opened up. By the terms of the Treaty of Tientsin, the sale of opium in China was legalized in 1858.

1. New powerful cartels being formed by the United States government with global interests and quasi judicial/law enforcement powers.

2. A new openness about the so-called rightness of imperialism by politically connected intellectuals.

3. Propaganda campaigns designed to link copyright infringement with terrorism. (And thus justify the use of force, both in the domestic and foreign spheres.)

Of course, my pure self-interest leads me to worry about the effects this will have here in the U.S. of A. not just the rest of the world. I don't want to go to jail for fixing my computer so it actually works correctly after a law is passed that requires it to be shipped broken (and stay broken!). I don't want the RIAA/MPAA to be given special law enforcement rights without any accountability under the Constitution. Basically, I don't want any of what's going on. Looks like we are all going to get it though, whether we like it or not!

Let's be reasonable here:

The Australian team being a small crew of academics and amateurs from a former prison colony obviously could not have developed anything so sophisticated as a scramjet and must therefore have stolen the secrets from the United States Government. This is prima facia evidence they are potential allies of Al Queda terrorists and should be monitored for any suspicious activity; after, of course, their facility has been put under 24 hour guard and surveillance by Homeland Defense.

sorry...but if you're going to begin a post with "learn to code" followed by your own code, you may want to include the library correctly: [incorrect code snipped]

Either way will work, but the correct way to include iostream is:

#include <iostream>

Slavery failed and ended not because slaves rebelled (they tried and failed). Slavery ended because it was not efficient (as in profitable) any more. Many slaves accepted their fate with no struggle, exactly as modern people give away their rights and information as something normal.

First, as far as the United States and the British Empire is concerned, slavery ended because it was abolished by law, not because it was unprofitable.

Second, in one sentence you note that slaves rebelled and in the next sentence you say many accepted their fate without a struggle. In fact, no slave owners counted on the cooperation of their slaves. They counted on force and the Fugitive Slave Act.

Third, modern people do not give away their rights. They trade them for something. We may question if it is a fair and reasonable trade but it is an option slaves did not have.

Modern life may have its trials and constraints but it bears no resemblance to slavery.

The one over in Brant Rock was probably the station of this guy (link swiped from someone else's post) who broadcast the first voice transmission as I believe Marconi did indeed use Cape Cod for his broadcast site.

On a completely unrelated note: ZOZO should at the very least be spelt Zoso (that's an 's' in the middle, not a 'z') and actually gets either Page or Plant (I can't remember which one) ticked off when it's called that as there are a) 3 other symbols (the feather, the 3 circles, and the other one), and b) they were never meant to be the album title, let alone words. Officially the album is untitled, unofficially it's known as Led Zeppelin IV.

Its a miracle! Someone actually mentioned the great, but unknown, Canadian who showed what *really* could be done in practical terms with radio. Thank you for that. Here's another Fessenden site. Canadians are not known for blowing our own horns, which means that we have an awful tendency to allow our brightest and best innovators to be ignored into obscurity over the years, as in the case of the 1940s-50s designers of the Avro Arrow, an aircraft decades ahead of its time. I've been listening to see if Fessenden will be acknowledged during the CBC's Marconi-related broadcasts, but still nothing.

Imagine that sort of banning of certain books, films or even thoughts happening in the USA? Never!

There's a great free text on C++ online, with a decent intro to OOP. I was able to understand Stroustrup much better after going through this.

For generic OOD, I really liked Booch's Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications (ISBN 0805353402).

If you can do C already, try taking a look at http://www.icce.rug.nl/docs/cplusplus/

It's a pretty good introduction to C++ for people who are already familiar with basic C.

That should have been http://odur.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/postscript/penguin .pdf for the ASCII logo.

You mean an ASCII version of Tux like this? I believe it's done using kernel source for the text. There are numerous RPMs for it found by searching on Google, including this list. If you're in to alternative Tux logos, look here, referenced by the earlier Slashdot article. Not sure about the more general "images into Tux" software, though.

North America is more British than it likes to portray, the true English capitalist and imperialists values still live on indomitably in the States even more so than in the UK. The British had their empire and have now moved on, but America is still operating and building its empire through the corporations and a great 'cultural imperialism'.

As was said in the late 1940's, "Britain has lost an empire and has yet to find a purpose", apart from a half-hearted attempt at socialism in the 60's, this could be just as true today.

As many in Westminster at the time of the American Revolution said, it is a true example of our values being carried forth into new lands, and just as the British would not be subservient to the French or any other nation, the people of the American Colonies would not be shackled by a misguided government in Westminster.

Reading today, it's amazing to see the dissention in Westminster when the decisions were made on what to do with the problems arising in America due to the stamp act etc, the most notable objections are of those of William Pitt, it seems they didn't particularly know how to deal with something which fundamentally was a civil war. The Brits did do the Americans a favour though, if it weren't for their early conquests you'd all be speaking French right now! I've heard a Brit counter with that when an American indicated he'd "be speaking German if it weren't for the Yanks in WW2". There's some amazing quotes from Benjamin Franklin on how these conquests fundamentally underpinned the greatness of the Empire, he was in London at the time. 13 years later he was signing The Declaration of Independence, oh the irony.

Maybe the Brits could have retained control (maybe not indefinitely) of the US if they ignored the incongruity of their values? I'm sure the militia men were kick ass and all, but the Brits could of blitzed the place if they decided to bring in the entire army and fleet, it seems they just used those armies to move onto new places though, namely, India.

Basically, because of this 'sun never sets' business, their forces were too thinly spread around the world.

It's amazing how the British manage(d) to be so competent yet incompetent at the same time.

I wonder what will become the future Yorktown of the American Empire? China?

One of Thomas Jefferson's letters addresses this. "It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions... If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea... He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

To reject IP as a legal fiction only leads us back to a terrifying fact that all property is, in essence, a lie. But it is a useful lie...

The U.S. Constitution does not grant patents and copyrights on the grounds of property rights. It grants them "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...". The phrase "intellectual property" is an oxymoron.

I agree that patents and copyrights, properly applied, have great social utility. But I would also argue that the DMCA and other current laws do not. Quite the opposite.

Nope, it's not property. You can't steal it (you can violate copyright restrictions).

See:
US Constitution, particularly Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 (the sole justification in the US for all "IP" - and it doesn't name them or call them property).
Thomas Jefferson's Letters, paying particular attention to his comments on copyright and ideas.
IP Myths, posted previously, and
The Copyright FAQ, also previously posted.

Years ago a guy at our chemistry lab wrote a game where you could catch food on your head. It used an SGI Indycam. It was quite fun to play, but a bit inprecize, and background dependent. See http://rugmd4.chem.rug.nl/hoesel/lu mbu s.html.

I knew this rang a bell - here's a 1995 game for the SGI Indy that uses the indycam as a 3d input device. From what I remember it was kind-of-usable but not exactly pinpoint accuracy. Got it at home somewhere.

Ever since I've been studying cryptography, poor Alice has been trying to talk to Bob without having that bitch Eve eavesdrop. Why can't Eve just let them be, for chrissakes?!? Then, as a side benefit, distributed.net would be able to redirect their efforts to something rather more worthwhile, such as looking for imaginary little green men.

On a side note, ever consider the possibility that Einstein was right all along and quantum magic really is bogus? If the linked-to people, currently disregarded by the scientific community as crackpots and throwbacks, end up proven right, that would be damned funny... "Hello? Yes, this is Mr Scientist Man, who is calling? Ah, the NSF? Yes, I know you've been giving us research grant money for the last 50 years to build huge particle accelerators and develop O(1) code-breaking for the NSA... you want to know why our prototype won't work? Well, it turns out that spooky action-at-a-distance is a measurement error, the Bell inequalities were never violated, and the universe is really fundamentally deterministic... sorry about that. See your money back? Not unless the NSF operates in the Bahamas too..."

It's like they say, nobody ever got fired for believing in Einstein...

One last thing... timothy, learn to close your italics.

I just found this page with some descriptions, and a taste of funky math :-) I haven't really checked it out fully, but it looks like it's probably a good place to get a basic idea of some of these principles (and hopefully they have some decent movies too).

enjoy.

Oh, and, "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodoss!"

History is on your side, of course, no third party has ever had an effect on the American system. That's why we have to put up with the South and their "peculiar institution" of slavery to this very day.

I wish you Whigs good luck in the general election, as for me, I'll continue to vote Libertarian.

~moron~

Speaking of revisionism...

If anything, it was the French, Spanish and Dutch attacking the British on other fronts (and for their own reasons, very little concerning democracy and independence) that weakened the British presence in the colonies and allowing for American victories. To say nothing of French military support of Washington's forces.

Americans didn't open any kind of whomp-ass on the British. The British simply found themselves with more urgent matters to deal with than a rather expensive revolution. In fact, it was a full two years after Cornwallis' defeat that the war finally ended. Not exactly a decisive victory, by any means.

Try here for a little information about your own country's history.

If you want massively parallel systems then I would honestly think that something like processtree would be a good solution since you can rent a phenomenal block of cpu time.

Well, obviously these machines are something inbetween the extremes you mention, and there are applications for which this is sort of a sweet-spot.

I have used an application for which this type of machines are excellent: molecular dynamics simulations.

The usual strategy for this type of software is to partion your system by giving every proc a share of the atoms. Then you start calculating forces and motions etc for each part for a short time period, and then compare them. Many forces extend to neighbouring parts, and atoms can move to other parts, so quite a lot of communications between the nodes is necessary. After exchanging this info, each node can compute the next timestep. This works quite well if most interactions between atoms are relatively short.

This type of app is excellently suited for a large cluster. It is naturally suited for message-passing, so programming it using MPI is easy. If you partion the system well, the memory use of one node is quite small, and fits for a large part in cache. IO between nodes has to happen quite often, so latency is a problem. So processtree is obviously no option.

These simulations scale quite well to larger molecular systems. Unfortunately, many researchers don't want more atoms in their systems, they want the simulation of their small system done faster. Unfortunately, this scaling is bad; if you end up with only a few atoms per node, the communication overhead boggs it down.

FYI, here are some old benchmarks of the software i used (gromacs). Although this software is considered to scale excellent, a 64 node machine is only 32 times as fast as a single-node machine...

Sorry if all this is incrompehensible, i guess i want to say too much too fast...

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813

It sounds to me a lot like what RMS has been saying all along.

In a letter to Isaac McPherson, on August 13th, 1813, Thomas Jefferson writes:
...
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until wecopied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
...

In other words, if I write a song, and it is recorded, I no longer have control over the spread of said song, and my song must stand on it's own value. If people like my song, and they like it a lot, then those people have the choice to make payment to me, not necessarily for the song itself, but as an encouragement to produce more songs.

However, it would be arrogant of me to assume that anything is owed me. How can I charge a price for something that no longer costs me anything? And how do I determine a price to charge another man for something that holds no value to him until it is given to him, especially when it may be of no value?

This stands as well in the concept of Patents on Ideas vs. Inventions (The implementation of Ideas), which was the original subject of this letter.

That we are revisiting problems that existed 200 years ago, is proof that the man who holds no value in history is doomed to repeat it.

-Tommy

Yes, we are supposed to be a Repuublic, and not a Democracy, as many politicians would have you believe. Thank God. If we were a Democracy, under majority rule, think of where we would be as a nation now. Women and Blacks would still have no rights, because the Majority of voters would never have allowed it. Popular != Right.

The problem with our current system, is the same problem that would exist in any democracy. The majority of voters are not led by informed decisions, but rather by marketing. The ongoing corruption of the Right to Bear Arms is proof enough of that. That apathy is the problem with the system is the one point I could not agree with you more on.

As for our founding fathers, although a few of them did in fact want a plutocracy, and a few others a monarchy (those being the only systems they understood, having lived in such a state their whole lives), enough of them were of sound mind to realize the folly in that. Thomas Jefferson for one was fully against it, and is well known for having written, "The Declaration of Independance". (Read the whole thing, not just the famous paragraph)

For a bunch of wealthy men out to protect their money and power, they sure made some stupid moves when they decided to take on all of England, which resulted in having their homes razed to the ground, their possesions confiscated, and their families killed, all in the name of Freedom and Equality for all men.

-Tommy

P.S Interesting side note, Thomas Jefferson was a huge Open Source advocate. Read this letter, "No patents on ideas".

People who actually want to change things rarely do it anonymously...Anonymous actions rarely have the same effect.

For more info >> Facial Recognition Page.

Not even horizontal and vertical lines are hardwired in. There have been experiments done with animals (not very ethical ones, I'd say), where they were put in environments with only horizontal lines. Their brains never developed the software for vertical line detections.

It must be evolutionarily expensive, but very necessary to recognize faces. More important than recognizing the most basic feature of lines right away.

coyo the coyote

http://www.rug. nl/rugcis/rc/ftp/origami/archives/a0022x/arc00229. txt

Oh, C software is very very vulnerable. Take a look at GNU software that has had problems.

Or a list of changes FreeBSD has made. (Note that about half of these are ported applications, not FreeBSD specific)

Or look here at some reasons why C is vulnerable to Y2k problems.

Just because it was written in C doesn't make it Y2k bugproof. Using time_t when possible is great, but the act of trying to make things human readable/parseable makes it harder.

Note too that most old Verisign keys expire on 12/31/99, people with old browsers should have fun on SSL sites. (Netscape allows 'Continue Anyway', IE won't allow you to)

Kevin

http://www.astro.rug.nl/~tim/desk.jpg

unfortunately, the US website doesn't appear to list it so i'm not sure if one can get it there ( i got mine in NL). if you can find it, it's worth it. it's one of the coolest (IMHO) computer tables i've seen anywhere.

tim

Running this one down took a little leg work, seeing as how the BBC did not elect to give the names of the researchers involved. As best I can tell the BBC has mixed up two separate lensing events. The paper that appears to have triggered the story is probably this paper on MACHO-97-BLG-41, since that is the most recent paper claiming a gravitational lensing planet detection. However, that paper is about a 3-Jupiter mass planet orbiting a binary star system, an interesting find, to be sure, but a far cry from an earth-sized planet. So, even if that is the article the BBC is responding to, it's not the one they're talking about.

The article mentions that the event was observed in 1998 and involved an earth-sized planet, so that sounds suspiciously like MACHO-98-BLG-35, but that paper came out (as a preprint) back in May, and it was announced at the January AAS meeting, so it's a little surprising to see a news article on it just now, unless it's just now appearing in the journals.

Anyhow, assuming the event is 98-BLG-35, there's more to the story. The PLANET collaboration also monitored this event, and they found no evidence of a planet in this system. As far as I know, the status of this system is still under dispute. Unless some problem has been found with PLANET's data, I think it's a little early to claim that an earthlike planet has been detected.

To get the scoop on microlensing, its application in planet searches, and the other things we can learn from it, I recommend PLANET's web page. Among other things, they talk about why microlensing is more sensitive than radial velocity studies (the technique that has produced most of the other extrasolar planet detections) to planets in star systems similar to our own solar system.

-r

Running this one down took a little leg work, seeing as how the BBC did not elect to give the names of the researchers involved. As best I can tell the BBC has mixed up two separate lensing events. The paper that appears to have triggered the story is probably this paper on MACHO-97-BLG-41, since that is the most recent paper claiming a gravitational lensing planet detection. However, that paper is about a 3-Jupiter mass planet orbiting a binary star system, an interesting find, to be sure, but a far cry from an earth-sized planet. So, even if that is the article the BBC is responding to, it's not the one they're talking about.

The article mentions that the event was observed in 1998 and involved an earth-sized planet, so that sounds suspiciously like MACHO-98-BLG-35, but that paper came out (as a preprint) back in May, and it was announced at the January AAS meeting, so it's a little surprising to see a news article on it just now, unless it's just now appearing in the journals.

Anyhow, assuming the event is 98-BLG-35, there's more to the story. The PLANET collaboration also monitored this event, and they found no evidence of a planet in this system. As far as I know, the status of this system is still under dispute. Unless some problem has been found with PLANET's data, I think it's a little early to claim that an earthlike planet has been detected.

To get the scoop on microlensing, its application in planet searches, and the other things we can learn from it, I recommend PLANET's web page. Among other things, they talk about why microlensing is more sensitive than radial velocity studies (the technique that has produced most of the other extrasolar planet detections) to planets in star systems similar to our own solar system.

-r

Running this one down took a little leg work, seeing as how the BBC did not elect to give the names of the researchers involved. As best I can tell the BBC has mixed up two separate lensing events. The paper that appears to have triggered the story is probably this paper on MACHO-97-BLG-41, since that is the most recent paper claiming a gravitational lensing planet detection. However, that paper is about a 3-Jupiter mass planet orbiting a binary star system, an interesting find, to be sure, but a far cry from an earth-sized planet. So, even if that is the article the BBC is responding to, it's not the one they're talking about.

The article mentions that the event was observed in 1998 and involved an earth-sized planet, so that sounds suspiciously like MACHO-98-BLG-35, but that paper came out (as a preprint) back in May, and it was announced at the January AAS meeting, so it's a little surprising to see a news article on it just now, unless it's just now appearing in the journals.

Anyhow, assuming the event is 98-BLG-35, there's more to the story. The PLANET collaboration also monitored this event, and they found no evidence of a planet in this system. As far as I know, the status of this system is still under dispute. Unless some problem has been found with PLANET's data, I think it's a little early to claim that an earthlike planet has been detected.

To get the scoop on microlensing, its application in planet searches, and the other things we can learn from it, I recommend PLANET's web page. Among other things, they talk about why microlensing is more sensitive than radial velocity studies (the technique that has produced most of the other extrasolar planet detections) to planets in star systems similar to our own solar system.

-r