Actually, I think you'll find that much of the backing for this law comes from Ireland. Ireland has few home-grown software companies and a lot of dev houses for American software companies. AOL and, IIRC, Microsoft both have massive development houses over there thanks to labour laws that make Ireland very friendly for them. If they can get software patents rammed through in Europe, they can safely relocate more of their workforce and operations there.
On the other hand, Germany and France have a lot more home-grown software companies. Especially open-source software companies. These have been cranking out some innovations (for example, a lot of crypto work's done in Germany these days, because their government is actually friendly to it, as opposed to the US), but have been held in check due to all the ambiguity over patents over there. Economically, Germany and France have everything to gain from prohibiting software patents and nothing to lose.
Dead on. "lack people skills" is manager-speak for "has morals". It means that the person in question isn't willing to spin lie after lie and do whatever it takes to improve their own situation at the expense of everyone else in the company. Of course, these are the only people they want in management. If someone ethical got promoted and started doing a good job, it'd prove that they'd been lying all along - that unethical greed isn't necessary for management, but that was just them fucking over everyone else because they couldn't do better.
Am I also a hypocrite if I support the police employing violence against dangerous criminals, but don't support the mob doing the same against common citizens?
The real question is, in my mind, what they do with it. If they just use it as a defensive patent, to protect themselves against, say, Microsoft using a similar patent to shut down their music service, then I don't see the problem. If they start using it to try to kill iTunes-alikes, like juk or rythmbox, THEN its cause for alarm.
Though that leads to a second question - how specific is it? juk, at least, is significantly different from iTunes in practice, even though it looks similar and has similar functionality.
Even worse - the GNOME developers don't just argue that their preferences are design choices, they argue that configurability is inherently bad. Never mind the decades of UI studies that show that configurability is a good thing as long as the defaults are carefully chosen.
The Nintendo DS is over $100 cheaper, according to what I've read. And the potential of the dual-screen setup is just amazing... It looks like they found a productive way to use all that wasted space that always winds up on handheld systems. In comparison, the Sony "competitor" just looks ungainly and unappealing.
Even just looking at the pictures and reading that it supports Bluetooth gave me high hopes for it. Unlike Sony's PSP, this device actually looks nice, and even though the screen's smaller and the CPU is less powerful, the touchscreen and backwards-compatibility seem to seal the deal. I'm sure the Sony fanboys are going to prattle endlessly about how Nintendo's doomed, but I think the DS, especially since its going to be parallel with the SP, has a real shot at success.
Especially since Square's already confirmed to be making games for it, among others...
And that the Bluetooth support means that you could, in theory, play multiplayer against GB games ported to PDAs, Apple laptops, or even some mobile phones! If Nintendo has their act together there, that could be a massive advantage for them.
In short, IBM's not on top because they want to sell you ways to do what they want you to do. They're on top because they sell you ways to do what you want to do. Contrast this with Microsoft's products, which constantly try to be smarter than the user and dictate to him how he is to use his computer and what he is to do with it.
True, though B5 still didn't try to do it for people. They also had a lot of "atmosphere" mechanics that crept in here and there, but they at least tried to make it look good. I loved some of the stuff they did with the Star Furies in that show...
Nuclear propulsion or, you know, a space elevator or skyhook. Or a massdriver for cargo and air-launches for humans. And "put up" an O'Neill habitat? Why would anyone bother launching it, or even all the bits needed to make it? O'Neill's plan, if you could actually be bothered to read it, involved three stages of habitats of escalating size, with each providing the infrastructure and jumping-off point necessary to construct the one above it. You say "yeah right" to mining and mass drivers on the moon, but once you've got a few Island 1 habitats in high orbit, it suddenly looks a lot more feasible to mine enough for some Island 2 habitats...
And chemical fuels ARE powerful enough - again, its NASA and its massive top-heavy bureaucracy that's killing launch costs. And given that rocketry is basically controlled explosions, and satellite deployment involves numerous intricate steps that must take place out of contact with a human, a 90% launch rate is pretty damn impressive. But again, this doesn't have much to do with launch capability.
Sure, the X-Prize guys aren't trying for orbit... But neither was van Braun, not at first. The tech they develop will probably be USABLE in a vehicle that will reach orbit.
Only worthwhile real estate? You've obviously never heard of O'Niell and, while a lot of his ideas were out there, his Island designs had fairly solid scientific grounding. And sure, Mars doesn't have a very thick atmosphere, but that's no real barrier to human habitation.
As for boring geology, have you ever read about Io? Titan? ANYTHING about the entire Uranus planetary system? The great dark spots on Neptune? There's so much strange and fascinating stuff in our own backyard that we just don't understand. Sure, we've got theories, and some of them are good theories, but they're a long way from explaining everything.
Its easy to say that space is boring if you've never bothered to research anything about space.
As for rocketry, yes, its been stuck, but not for technical reasons. Commercial concerns have largely been banned from space exploration, and NASA's got political blinkers on. The Europeans and the X-Prize teams have been making massive strides lately. To some degree, they're playing catch-up with NASA, but there's a lot of energy and new ideas there. Even the teams that don't win the prize will likely wind up with workable systems eventually that SOMEONE will be interested in buying.
The distortion's introduced because Hubble is observing very, very distant objects - on the order of thousands or millions of light-years. When viewed from Earth, these objects are smaller than a dot in the sky and easily obscured or distorted by movements in the atmosphere. When viewing the Earth from orbit, however, there are much smaller distances involved, so the distortion introduced by the atmosphere falls below the level of distortion introduced by the camera in the first place.
With some research, I could give you precise figures involving dimensions and introduced error by light passing through a medium (in this case, the atmosphere), but the above explanation was arrived at by applying incredibly basic physics and engineering to the problem.
The word probably is used because, as other posters have pointed out, scientists don't like to make unsubstantiated claims. The poster knows of no way to do this and several factors that might make it impossible, but its not willing to rule out the possibility entirely. IE, leaving himself open to contradictory evidence, a mindset that is the heart of the scientific method.
The best, and I'd say nigh-only way to teach an astronomy class is with the aid of a telescope and programs like Celestia. Its fine to go on about the moons of Jupiter and the distances involved, but quite another thing entirely to actually pull out a telescope and look, or zoom around in Celestia and explore for yourself. Yes, there are other things that have to be taught, but without that basis, it seems like teaching physics or chemistry without labs.
I do speak partially from experience, as I've had a number of astronomy teachers over the years who have bothered to actually pull out telescopes. Most these days can't be bothered, as it requires extra effort to organize an after-hours field trip. But it still helps a lot.
The other problem is that doing zero-gravity and making it both look and act "right" is very, very difficult and expensive. Its trivial in animation, which is why anime often has things that are almost right (usually with some changes for dramatic effect), but Hollywood can't be bothered.
I think he's talking about the American Solar Car Challenge. Its quite an interesting activity, especially all the different tricks the teams use to try to get more performance out of their cars. (And there's quite a variety!) I know one of the coders who was on Principia's team last year (they came in 4th, which is really impressive, considering some of the competition) and the stories about all the stuff they went through to get a working car are fascinating.
Actually, I think its more that they want to kill APPLE's online music store. Apple's one of the few computer companies that's flipped them off over the whole "trusted computing" car wreck, and they're both the most successful online music retailer AND they distribute indie songs. Oh yes, and their DRM is paper-thin.
They've got no problem with Microsoft or Real's stores, because they've got DRM that makes being chained up in a 1 m^3 stone cell with no windows seem a positively cheery proposition. But Apple? The RIAA has a long memory, and they remember Rip, Mix, Burn. This is payback.
I fully expect this to be Microsoft's next volley. Some little company will start tossing patent infringement claims at the Linux and BSD kernels. These will be latched onto by the mainstream media. When it finally comes to trial, the patents will be found to be invalid and the sock puppet will be wiped out messily... An event that will largely be ignored by the media.
Unfortunately, there's little chance of getting a President next term who might push the Justice Dept to stop this scam...
Apple clung on for dear life and will eventually falter -- iTunes can only hold out for so long.
So Apple's making all their money from the iTMS now? Apple is, from all signs, one of the only tech companies likely to survive, other than IBM and Novell. As the iPod Mini showed, they actually make things that the mainstream WANTS. Microsoft's 100% dependant on total market dominance and a constantly expanding desktop market, and both of those are getting eroded slowly but surely. Sun is just a sick, sick joke at this point.
AOL survived only through tricky accounting. Nothing more, nothing less. It was all one great, big shell game, and it looks like its finally started to catch up with them.
I think its more that people looked at it, looked at the systems they'd be expected to integrate it with and the hardware it needed, and said "Our customers would never buy anything that used this." So now Microsoft, who has bet the proverbial PR farm on Palladium, has decided that they're going to integrate it with Longhorn somehow and force all their partners and customers to use it.
Yet another reason why Longhorn's release is going to get pushed back again and might have trouble finding acceptance in the marketplace.
Analysts on the other hand, place a tremendous amount of value on R&D spending. That IS a long term effect.
They definitely don't say its a bad thing. But what I've noticed is that it doesn't tend to get mentioned at all when evaluating a company. There's all sorts of other figures that get tossed around but, somehow, R&D spending just tends to fall by the wayside. And when was the last time a company made a big deal over increasing R&D spending? Not recently, that's for sure, because it rarely happens. They do make a big deal over government R&D grants, but those don't cost THEM anything...
Yes, some companies still do research. Microsoft, IBM, most drug companies... But most of it is, again, short-term-focused. They're working on producing a product that'll sell well in five months' time, not one that'll revolutionize the world in five years.
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Actually, I think you'll find that much of the backing for this law comes from Ireland. Ireland has few home-grown software companies and a lot of dev houses for American software companies. AOL and, IIRC, Microsoft both have massive development houses over there thanks to labour laws that make Ireland very friendly for them. If they can get software patents rammed through in Europe, they can safely relocate more of their workforce and operations there.
On the other hand, Germany and France have a lot more home-grown software companies. Especially open-source software companies. These have been cranking out some innovations (for example, a lot of crypto work's done in Germany these days, because their government is actually friendly to it, as opposed to the US), but have been held in check due to all the ambiguity over patents over there. Economically, Germany and France have everything to gain from prohibiting software patents and nothing to lose.
Dead on. "lack people skills" is manager-speak for "has morals". It means that the person in question isn't willing to spin lie after lie and do whatever it takes to improve their own situation at the expense of everyone else in the company. Of course, these are the only people they want in management. If someone ethical got promoted and started doing a good job, it'd prove that they'd been lying all along - that unethical greed isn't necessary for management, but that was just them fucking over everyone else because they couldn't do better.
Am I also a hypocrite if I support the police employing violence against dangerous criminals, but don't support the mob doing the same against common citizens?
The real question is, in my mind, what they do with it. If they just use it as a defensive patent, to protect themselves against, say, Microsoft using a similar patent to shut down their music service, then I don't see the problem. If they start using it to try to kill iTunes-alikes, like juk or rythmbox, THEN its cause for alarm.
Though that leads to a second question - how specific is it? juk, at least, is significantly different from iTunes in practice, even though it looks similar and has similar functionality.
Even worse - the GNOME developers don't just argue that their preferences are design choices, they argue that configurability is inherently bad. Never mind the decades of UI studies that show that configurability is a good thing as long as the defaults are carefully chosen.
Yes, especially when 90% of the posters are anonymous and don't want to own up to the comments they make. Ass.
The Nintendo DS is over $100 cheaper, according to what I've read. And the potential of the dual-screen setup is just amazing... It looks like they found a productive way to use all that wasted space that always winds up on handheld systems. In comparison, the Sony "competitor" just looks ungainly and unappealing.
Even just looking at the pictures and reading that it supports Bluetooth gave me high hopes for it. Unlike Sony's PSP, this device actually looks nice, and even though the screen's smaller and the CPU is less powerful, the touchscreen and backwards-compatibility seem to seal the deal. I'm sure the Sony fanboys are going to prattle endlessly about how Nintendo's doomed, but I think the DS, especially since its going to be parallel with the SP, has a real shot at success.
Especially since Square's already confirmed to be making games for it, among others...
And that the Bluetooth support means that you could, in theory, play multiplayer against GB games ported to PDAs, Apple laptops, or even some mobile phones! If Nintendo has their act together there, that could be a massive advantage for them.
In short, IBM's not on top because they want to sell you ways to do what they want you to do. They're on top because they sell you ways to do what you want to do. Contrast this with Microsoft's products, which constantly try to be smarter than the user and dictate to him how he is to use his computer and what he is to do with it.
True, though B5 still didn't try to do it for people. They also had a lot of "atmosphere" mechanics that crept in here and there, but they at least tried to make it look good. I loved some of the stuff they did with the Star Furies in that show...
Nuclear propulsion or, you know, a space elevator or skyhook. Or a massdriver for cargo and air-launches for humans. And "put up" an O'Neill habitat? Why would anyone bother launching it, or even all the bits needed to make it? O'Neill's plan, if you could actually be bothered to read it, involved three stages of habitats of escalating size, with each providing the infrastructure and jumping-off point necessary to construct the one above it. You say "yeah right" to mining and mass drivers on the moon, but once you've got a few Island 1 habitats in high orbit, it suddenly looks a lot more feasible to mine enough for some Island 2 habitats...
And chemical fuels ARE powerful enough - again, its NASA and its massive top-heavy bureaucracy that's killing launch costs. And given that rocketry is basically controlled explosions, and satellite deployment involves numerous intricate steps that must take place out of contact with a human, a 90% launch rate is pretty damn impressive. But again, this doesn't have much to do with launch capability.
Sure, the X-Prize guys aren't trying for orbit... But neither was van Braun, not at first. The tech they develop will probably be USABLE in a vehicle that will reach orbit.
Only worthwhile real estate? You've obviously never heard of O'Niell and, while a lot of his ideas were out there, his Island designs had fairly solid scientific grounding. And sure, Mars doesn't have a very thick atmosphere, but that's no real barrier to human habitation.
As for boring geology, have you ever read about Io? Titan? ANYTHING about the entire Uranus planetary system? The great dark spots on Neptune? There's so much strange and fascinating stuff in our own backyard that we just don't understand. Sure, we've got theories, and some of them are good theories, but they're a long way from explaining everything.
Its easy to say that space is boring if you've never bothered to research anything about space.
As for rocketry, yes, its been stuck, but not for technical reasons. Commercial concerns have largely been banned from space exploration, and NASA's got political blinkers on. The Europeans and the X-Prize teams have been making massive strides lately. To some degree, they're playing catch-up with NASA, but there's a lot of energy and new ideas there. Even the teams that don't win the prize will likely wind up with workable systems eventually that SOMEONE will be interested in buying.
The distortion's introduced because Hubble is observing very, very distant objects - on the order of thousands or millions of light-years. When viewed from Earth, these objects are smaller than a dot in the sky and easily obscured or distorted by movements in the atmosphere. When viewing the Earth from orbit, however, there are much smaller distances involved, so the distortion introduced by the atmosphere falls below the level of distortion introduced by the camera in the first place.
With some research, I could give you precise figures involving dimensions and introduced error by light passing through a medium (in this case, the atmosphere), but the above explanation was arrived at by applying incredibly basic physics and engineering to the problem.
The word probably is used because, as other posters have pointed out, scientists don't like to make unsubstantiated claims. The poster knows of no way to do this and several factors that might make it impossible, but its not willing to rule out the possibility entirely. IE, leaving himself open to contradictory evidence, a mindset that is the heart of the scientific method.
The best, and I'd say nigh-only way to teach an astronomy class is with the aid of a telescope and programs like Celestia. Its fine to go on about the moons of Jupiter and the distances involved, but quite another thing entirely to actually pull out a telescope and look, or zoom around in Celestia and explore for yourself. Yes, there are other things that have to be taught, but without that basis, it seems like teaching physics or chemistry without labs.
I do speak partially from experience, as I've had a number of astronomy teachers over the years who have bothered to actually pull out telescopes. Most these days can't be bothered, as it requires extra effort to organize an after-hours field trip. But it still helps a lot.
The other problem is that doing zero-gravity and making it both look and act "right" is very, very difficult and expensive. Its trivial in animation, which is why anime often has things that are almost right (usually with some changes for dramatic effect), but Hollywood can't be bothered.
I think he's talking about the American Solar Car Challenge. Its quite an interesting activity, especially all the different tricks the teams use to try to get more performance out of their cars. (And there's quite a variety!) I know one of the coders who was on Principia's team last year (they came in 4th, which is really impressive, considering some of the competition) and the stories about all the stuff they went through to get a working car are fascinating.
Actually, I think its more that they want to kill APPLE's online music store. Apple's one of the few computer companies that's flipped them off over the whole "trusted computing" car wreck, and they're both the most successful online music retailer AND they distribute indie songs. Oh yes, and their DRM is paper-thin.
They've got no problem with Microsoft or Real's stores, because they've got DRM that makes being chained up in a 1 m^3 stone cell with no windows seem a positively cheery proposition. But Apple? The RIAA has a long memory, and they remember Rip, Mix, Burn. This is payback.
I fully expect this to be Microsoft's next volley. Some little company will start tossing patent infringement claims at the Linux and BSD kernels. These will be latched onto by the mainstream media. When it finally comes to trial, the patents will be found to be invalid and the sock puppet will be wiped out messily... An event that will largely be ignored by the media.
Unfortunately, there's little chance of getting a President next term who might push the Justice Dept to stop this scam...
Apple clung on for dear life and will eventually falter -- iTunes can only hold out for so long.
So Apple's making all their money from the iTMS now? Apple is, from all signs, one of the only tech companies likely to survive, other than IBM and Novell. As the iPod Mini showed, they actually make things that the mainstream WANTS. Microsoft's 100% dependant on total market dominance and a constantly expanding desktop market, and both of those are getting eroded slowly but surely. Sun is just a sick, sick joke at this point.
AOL survived only through tricky accounting. Nothing more, nothing less. It was all one great, big shell game, and it looks like its finally started to catch up with them.
I think its more that people looked at it, looked at the systems they'd be expected to integrate it with and the hardware it needed, and said "Our customers would never buy anything that used this." So now Microsoft, who has bet the proverbial PR farm on Palladium, has decided that they're going to integrate it with Longhorn somehow and force all their partners and customers to use it.
Yet another reason why Longhorn's release is going to get pushed back again and might have trouble finding acceptance in the marketplace.
Screen is a poor-ass replacement for real tabbed terminal sessions. Any terminal worth its salt will give you keypress options for changing tabs.
You must admit, however, that killing the network connection DOES close the hole quite effectively!
Analysts on the other hand, place a tremendous amount of value on R&D spending. That IS a long term effect.
They definitely don't say its a bad thing. But what I've noticed is that it doesn't tend to get mentioned at all when evaluating a company. There's all sorts of other figures that get tossed around but, somehow, R&D spending just tends to fall by the wayside. And when was the last time a company made a big deal over increasing R&D spending? Not recently, that's for sure, because it rarely happens. They do make a big deal over government R&D grants, but those don't cost THEM anything...
Yes, some companies still do research. Microsoft, IBM, most drug companies... But most of it is, again, short-term-focused. They're working on producing a product that'll sell well in five months' time, not one that'll revolutionize the world in five years.
Hard to tell. There were probably a number of reasons, though that could definitely have been one of them.
Er. Seen that before and it is messy. That'll teach me not to preview more closely. ;)