At least here in Germany there is an added incentive for the commpanies not to charge falsely. If the charge is recalled by the customer the charging company has to pay a recall fee. As far as i know this fee is 15 EURO. This is a substantial amount of money to loose on a false debit.
Because of this most companies are very fast in repaying money they charged falsely. I even saw a few disclaimers on invoices to call the company if something is wrong with the invoice and not to recall the money. This seriously changes the balance of power between customer and companies.
On the other hand some vendors are moaning that this gives to much power to the customer to order something and recall the money once the goods have arrived. To get there money they have to take legal steps or give the debt to a debt collecting agency. But such cases are rare as most customers are honest.
I always wondered if a GUI that looks like 95% Windows is the right way to go?
I have often seen users look at the KDE GUI that say:"Hey that looks like Windows" that are extremely disappointed that it doesn't work like Windows.
A GUI that looks different may be a little more intimidating at the first look, but the users will not assume that it works like windows. This will lead to pleasant surprises when it work like windows and things that work in other ways will be accepted easier. Not the other way round.
Pretending to be something you are not is the wrong way to go here (i think).
Ok i don't like Intel very much, but this is a bit uninformed. Perhaps you should read up on the specs of the Pentium 4 over here at AnandTech.
If a 20 Stage Pipeline was a good move is to be seen. But the design takes the long latencies coming with a pipeline stall into account and tries to battle it at every front. This are better Branch-Prediction, ALUs working at double CPU core frequency and the Trace-Cache. since this is the first chip implementing a Trace-Cache i'm very interrested how this new cache model will influence performance.
To see how the new chip perform we will have to wait for neutral benchmarks. Perhaps it will not beat the Athlon clock by clock, but it will start with 1.5 GHz und will scale well beyond 2 Ghz this will make it the performance leader for some time.
About the floating point performance. IMHO Intel stopped beating the old x86 stack based FPU model to death and is walking along the way of SSE2. With a good optimizing compiler this will be pretty competitive. We can only hope Intel helps to get gcc to a point where it can optimize for the SSE Instructions as well as the Intel compilers.
you can replace the word "Guns" in that sentence with almost any other word and it still holds true.. so there isn't much going on there.
This is no argument, this is simply a not very intelligent play of words. Even if a can replace the word gun with another word the statement still holds true.
the only reason for a govenment to take the right away is if they want to control the people.. government should not be about that!
Have you ever thought about the idea that there are much more subtle ways to control people. Gun control has nothing to do with controlling people. As i stated before, owning a gun will not help you if the state tries to control you. What will you do? Shoot the laywer? Kill some cops. If you do not have the support of a great part of the population, you will not make a difference. Perhaps you should start and speak up against biased media reports, gross unfairness in trade agreements and not try to justify gun ownership, which will not help you much anyway.
No more simple minded than thinking talking is going to stop marshall law.
In a democracy talking will stop marshall law because no ruler will get the majority of the people to back him up. This is not a problem of owning guns, but a problem of education in the populace at large. What you should do to prevent to marshall law is take an interest in politics, exercise your rights and try interest others too. Here i see a problem especially in America where the mass media tries to control the general political climate, mostly in favour of Corporate America.
The only thing that can protect you from the power of the state is to get enough citizens to back you and speak up against the things you do not like
if the state is a democracy..
I always had the impression that the United States is a democracy. Correct me if i'm wrong. And even in non democracys this is a correct statement. To succesfully influence a government you will need the help of a majority of the population, or tons of money:-). Weapons can help if the goverment has nothing to loose and is fighting to the end. But if you look at some of the more succesfull revolutions in newer history, especially at the process of overthrowing the stalinist governments in Russia and Eastern Germany (Poland or Tschecheslovakia, too) you will notice that armed conflict would have been counterproductive. In the hot phase, when the old government was loosing power, an armed attack would most likely have led to civil war. This could have led to states ruled by the military, which is always a Very Bad Thing.
from what I've been hearing about the businesses and living environment in germany you have much more severe problems than gun controll... the arsenal isn't doing you guys much good there...
Oh, this is a good one. This is complete FUD. What have you heard about Germany? I would like to hear your case and not some vaporous unbacked accusations.
The only uncontrolled guns are those which are controlled by people who are irresposible or are untrained because gun use is so tabboo and un-PC... I know tons of people who have guns.. I trust them all.
Oh yes this are the People who's children take a gun and shoot themselves by playing with them. This are the people who shoot on sight if someone walks onto their lawn at night? I never said that there are no People who can be trusted to own a gun. But i'm getting sarcastic here. I said that a gun in your house will make no big difference if the government is going to suppress you. By the way i do not think guns are evil or un-PC as you state it. I have handled guns, i have shot shot them, i know how to use them, they are simply tools, not evil, not good, but dangerous. They are simply not necessary anymore, i can live without one and do not feel something taken away from me. I can even see where the gun laws in America originated. At this time there were good reasons to encourage every citizen to own a gun. May it be the thread from Europe to control the colonies, which had no standing army at this time or the absence of a law enforcement system in huge parts of the country. But times move on. Sometimes you have reevaluate your laws and look if the reasons are still there. I think there are strong arguments that uncontrolled weapon ownership in modern democracys do more harm than good.
Come on face it, the only thing that will save you if the any somewhat organized state is trying to suppress it's own people is democracy and civil courage.
Guns will only lead to more deaths, in times of peace and in times of unrest. The only succesful overthrowings of oppressing government in this century, that did not bring leaders to the front that made it even worse are the ones that used minimum force. You must only look at the countries in eastern europe.
To think guns can protect you from the state is extremely simpleminded. The only thing that can protect you from the power of the state is to get enough citizens to back you and speak up against the things you do not like.
If you fight with guns you aill only be denounced as a terorrist (quite correctly i think).
I live here in Germany where we have quite strict gun laws. I cannot say i fell oppressed. I know i have the complete arsenal of a citizen of a democratic state at my hands if the state tries to oppress me. This is enough.
The only things i can see looking tu the US is that uncontrolled guns tend to produce many unnecesarry accidents and a general feeling of mistrust.
This is perhaps alittle offtopic here. But for anyone who likes great Science-Fiction, i can recommend Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The Books describe the settelment and terraforming of Mars by mankind over nearly 150 years.
The terraforming part is well thought out beginning with small windmills to produce heat, introducing algae and lichens to break up CO2 and ultimately bringing in nitrogen from the asteroid belt and Jupiter to make large scale plant growth possible.
I might add: Even if someone were a lawyer he has not the right to interpert laws. Even if a lawyer gives some advice on legal matters, especially such untestet things as the DCSS rulling, nothing says that this advice is rigth.
The only instance that can give you the right answer is always the last court of appeal. Everything a mere laywer says is only an opinion that has to be tested in court. Even if it is a more knowing and professional opinion than that of the others
I wonder if it is possible to produce a mixed binary/open source player. I think of the way xanim integrated the codecs for various closed source formats.
One could pack the DVD CSS decoding part into a binary module. The module could be linked into the player at runtime, or at compile time. All other parts of the player could be open sourced.
I think this is simply a licensing problem. So we would get a player all could hack at. And the binary modules would be so small the could be made bullet proof by a few core developers.
There is of course a german word for source, it's Quellcode. There is even a german word for software but i cannot remember it at the moment, its not in widespread use. But you could use the term "Programm" interchangeable with software and wouldn't get beaten for it.
Of course "Offene Quellcode Programme" sounds amazingly stupid to a german ear. So we borrow the english Version Open Source Software or call it "Freie Software". "Freie" means free as in speech not beer:-) "Free" as in beer would be "kostenlos" (at no cost). Here german is somewhat more exact then english.
I think i have to defend the GEMA here a little. First of all the arrogant quote in the above text is somewhat out of context.
The GEMA is a NON profit Organization. Every Author, Componist or other copyright holder can become a member an can register their works with them. Everyone who wants to use works registered with GEMA in non private use (Playing at public places. Broadcasting via Radio, TV. Using in Films) has to contact GEMA and has to pay a fee. The fee's are redistributed by GEMA to the copyright holders.
GEMA fee's are often the only payment the copyright holder (The Bands!) recive after the initial payment they received from the label which brought their record to market.
The GEMA gets a small fee for every recording equipment und recording media. This fee allows everyone who owns a record to make copys of this records for personal use. You can even give this recordings to friends without getting into legal trouble. The fee on media is small, a few Pfennig ( 1 Pfennig = 1/2 cent) per media.
So GEMA is not a tool og the recording industry to make their profits on the back of the authors. It's a tool to get the authors the licensing fees the users have to pay for using their music.
if you want to read more about GEMA try their website. As for the potential misuse of the content blocking system, i must completely agree with you.
I know the automobile is not truly invented in the 20th Century, but mass Production of Automobiles changed whole societies.
Just think of America where the introduction of automobiles for the masses changed social behavior. The whole process of dating changed with ypung people having a place where they weren't constantly under the scrutiny of their parents.
On the other side the government of many a country has gone to great lengths insuring cheap individual transport for their citicens. Until today the struggle for control of the worlds oil reserves is linked to this.
A few other Points may be:
- One can live far away of his working place.
- Massive destruction of natural resources and environmental Pollution. I'm sure i could go one with this list, but i'll keep this short. Thomas
Of course giving the patent to the one who first inventet it is the right thing to do. I didn't wan't to build a case for european against american laws, i just wanted to point out where some of the problems are, as i see them.
But i do not see where this argumentation contradicts the the point i made. The reported cases i mentioned are from an Articel series in a major german news magazine (Der Spiegel) about the Echelon network. The problem is once a patent is registered you have a major legal battle at hand to get your invention back. This case has to be made before an american court, which is no easy task for a smaller non american firm. Especially because 'first to invent' is much harder to prove than 'first to file'.
First i wanted to add that contrary to popular belief here on/. patents werent invented to stop the shareng of ideas. They were invented to help sharing ideas.
The reasoning behind this was (to my knowledge) to encourage a firm to patend their inventions by giving them the right to use them for themselves for a number of years. To do this they must make the idea or process public. This means they have to share it with everyone. This is IMHO a Good Thing. When the patent expires the knowledge is given to the public for free use.
The Question here is why and when got the process of patents got twisted around and changed to something that is actually hindering progress and not helping it along.
In my opinion this has the following reasons:
1.) The whole patenting process is from a time when technical innovation was moving much slower. The timelines for patents are just to long these days and should be shortened. Or perhaps an evalution process should be used, so that patens will be given to the public domain after a firm made a decent return on investment from them. But this would perhaps lead to another insane buerocratic nightmare:-)
2.) The American patent laws do not have a clause for mandatory licensing. As far as i know this is the case for some European patent Laws. Under this Laws a license must be issued to any firm that applys for one. So a firm can make money by licensing the innovations, but cannot hoard innovations by keeping them for themselves.
3.) The American Government sees strict Patents laws as a way to ensure that dominace of American firms on the world market. There are a reported cases, when obviously stolen patents of non american firms appeared to to be patented in America just before this firms themselves applied for the international patent. As the American goverment once stated openly, it sees industrial espionage as a legimate way to ensure American dominance for key technologies. So the American legislature has a good reason (for them) not to change this laws.
I think the system itself is not completely without reason. But the implementation lends itself to misuse. I'm not sure if the system could be fixed, so big firm cannot use it to stiffle Open Software or competitors. Perhaps it is inherently flawed and should be thrown away. But this would lead to a severe cut in the exchange of ideas beetween commercial operating buissinesses. I dont like patents but i'm not sure, if we wouldn't go from bad to worse by dumping them.
At least there should be clear criteria what is allowed to patend and what not. Buying books with one click should not patentable, this only leads to misuse.
Oh, before i forget. Patents are already hampering the implementation of Free Software in a major field, audio compression. To my knowledge there was once a project under way to specify a new free audio standard that could replace mp3. The project was cancelled because most of the key technologies needed for good, lossy audio compression were already patented und could not be used.
Slashdot Mirror
At least here in Germany there is an added incentive for the commpanies not to charge falsely. If the charge is recalled by the customer the charging company has to pay a recall fee. As far as i know this fee is 15 EURO. This is a substantial amount of money to loose on a false debit.
Because of this most companies are very fast in repaying money they charged falsely. I even saw a few disclaimers on invoices to call the company if something is wrong with the invoice and not to recall the money. This seriously changes the balance of power between customer and companies.
On the other hand some vendors are moaning that this gives to much power to the customer to order something and recall the money once the goods have arrived. To get there money they have to take legal steps or give the debt to a debt collecting agency. But such cases are rare as most customers are honest.
I always wondered if a GUI that looks like 95% Windows is the right way to go?
I have often seen users look at the KDE GUI that say:"Hey that looks like Windows" that are extremely disappointed that it doesn't work like Windows.
A GUI that looks different may be a little more intimidating at the first look, but the users will not assume that it works like windows. This will lead to pleasant surprises when it work like windows and things that work in other ways will be accepted easier. Not the other way round.
Pretending to be something you are not is the wrong way to go here (i think).
If a 20 Stage Pipeline was a good move is to be seen. But the design takes the long latencies coming with a pipeline stall into account and tries to battle it at every front. This are better Branch-Prediction, ALUs working at double CPU core frequency and the Trace-Cache. since this is the first chip implementing a Trace-Cache i'm very interrested how this new cache model will influence performance.
To see how the new chip perform we will have to wait for neutral benchmarks. Perhaps it will not beat the Athlon clock by clock, but it will start with 1.5 GHz und will scale well beyond 2 Ghz this will make it the performance leader for some time.
About the floating point performance. IMHO Intel stopped beating the old x86 stack based FPU model to death and is walking along the way of SSE2. With a good optimizing compiler this will be pretty competitive. We can only hope Intel helps to get gcc to a point where it can optimize for the SSE Instructions as well as the Intel compilers.
thomas
This is no argument, this is simply a not very intelligent play of words. Even if a can replace the word gun with another word the statement still holds true.
the only reason for a govenment to take the right away is if they want to control the people.. government should not be about that!
Have you ever thought about the idea that there are much more subtle ways to control people. Gun control has nothing to do with controlling people. As i stated before, owning a gun will not help you if the state tries to control you. What will you do? Shoot the laywer? Kill some cops. If you do not have the support of a great part of the population, you will not make a difference. Perhaps you should start and speak up against biased media reports, gross unfairness in trade agreements and not try to justify gun ownership, which will not help you much anyway.
No more simple minded than thinking talking is going to stop marshall law.
In a democracy talking will stop marshall law because no ruler will get the majority of the people to back him up. This is not a problem of owning guns, but a problem of education in the populace at large. What you should do to prevent to marshall law is take an interest in politics, exercise your rights and try interest others too. Here i see a problem especially in America where the mass media tries to control the general political climate, mostly in favour of Corporate America.
The only thing that can protect you from the power of the state is to get enough citizens to back you and speak up against the things you do not like
if the state is a democracy..
I always had the impression that the United States is a democracy. Correct me if i'm wrong. And even in non democracys this is a correct statement. To succesfully influence a government you will need the help of a majority of the population, or tons of money :-). Weapons can help if the goverment has nothing to loose and is fighting to the end. But if you look at some of the more succesfull revolutions in newer history, especially at the process of overthrowing the stalinist governments in Russia and Eastern Germany (Poland or Tschecheslovakia, too) you will notice that armed conflict would have been counterproductive. In the hot phase, when the old government was loosing power, an armed attack would most likely have led to civil war. This could have led to states ruled by the military, which is always a Very Bad Thing.
from what I've been hearing about the businesses and living environment in germany you have much more severe problems than gun controll... the arsenal isn't doing you guys much good there...
Oh, this is a good one. This is complete FUD. What have you heard about Germany? I would like to hear your case and not some vaporous unbacked accusations.
The only uncontrolled guns are those which are controlled by people who are irresposible or are untrained because gun use is so tabboo and un-PC... I know tons of people who have guns.. I trust them all.
Oh yes this are the People who's children take a gun and shoot themselves by playing with them. This are the people who shoot on sight if someone walks onto their lawn at night? I never said that there are no People who can be trusted to own a gun. But i'm getting sarcastic here.
I said that a gun in your house will make no big difference if the government is going to suppress you. By the way i do not think guns are evil or un-PC as you state it. I have handled guns, i have shot shot them, i know how to use them, they are simply tools, not evil, not good, but dangerous. They are simply not necessary anymore, i can live without one and do not feel something taken away from me. I can even see where the gun laws in America originated. At this time there were good reasons to encourage every citizen to own a gun. May it be the thread from Europe to control the colonies, which had no standing army at this time or the absence of a law enforcement system in huge parts of the country. But times move on. Sometimes you have reevaluate your laws and look if the reasons are still there. I think there are strong arguments that uncontrolled weapon ownership in modern democracys do more harm than good.
thomas
Guns will only lead to more deaths, in times of peace and in times of unrest. The only succesful overthrowings of oppressing government in this century, that did not bring leaders to the front that made it even worse are the ones that used minimum force. You must only look at the countries in eastern europe.
To think guns can protect you from the state is extremely simpleminded. The only thing that can protect you from the power of the state is to get enough citizens to back you and speak up against the things you do not like.
If you fight with guns you aill only be denounced as a terorrist (quite correctly i think).
I live here in Germany where we have quite strict gun laws. I cannot say i fell oppressed. I know i have the complete arsenal of a citizen of a democratic state at my hands if the state tries to oppress me. This is enough.
The only things i can see looking tu the US is that uncontrolled guns tend to produce many unnecesarry accidents and a general feeling of mistrust.
The terraforming part is well thought out beginning with small windmills to produce heat, introducing algae and lichens to break up CO2 and ultimately bringing in nitrogen from the asteroid belt and Jupiter to make large scale plant growth possible.
A must read :-)
Thomas
The only instance that can give you the right answer is always the last court of appeal. Everything a mere laywer says is only an opinion that has to be tested in court. Even if it is a more knowing and professional opinion than that of the others
thomas
One could pack the DVD CSS decoding part into a binary module. The module could be linked into the player at runtime, or at compile time. All other parts of the player could be open sourced.
I think this is simply a licensing problem. So we would get a player all could hack at. And the binary modules would be so small the could be made bullet proof by a few core developers.
Any sugestions what license to use?
thomas
Of course "Offene Quellcode Programme" sounds amazingly stupid to a german ear. So we borrow the english Version Open Source Software or call it "Freie Software". "Freie" means free as in speech not beer :-) "Free" as in beer would be "kostenlos" (at no cost). Here german is somewhat more exact then english.
Just some rambling.
The GEMA is a NON profit Organization. Every Author, Componist or other copyright holder can become a member an can register their works with them. Everyone who wants to use works registered with GEMA in non private use (Playing at public places. Broadcasting via Radio, TV. Using in Films) has to contact GEMA and has to pay a fee. The fee's are redistributed by GEMA to the copyright holders.
GEMA fee's are often the only payment the copyright holder (The Bands!) recive after the initial payment they received from the label which brought their record to market.
The GEMA gets a small fee for every recording equipment und recording media. This fee allows everyone who owns a record to make copys of this records for personal use. You can even give this recordings to friends without getting into legal trouble. The fee on media is small, a few Pfennig ( 1 Pfennig = 1/2 cent) per media.
So GEMA is not a tool og the recording industry to make their profits on the back of the authors. It's a tool to get the authors the licensing fees the users have to pay for using their music.
if you want to read more about GEMA try their website. As for the potential misuse of the content blocking system, i must completely agree with you.
Just think of America where the introduction of automobiles for the masses changed social behavior. The whole process of dating changed with ypung people having a place where they weren't constantly under the scrutiny of their parents.
On the other side the government of many a country has gone to great lengths insuring cheap individual transport for their citicens. Until today the struggle for control of the worlds oil reserves is linked to this.
A few other Points may be:
- One can live far away of his working place.
- Massive destruction of natural resources and environmental Pollution. I'm sure i could go one with this list, but i'll keep this short. Thomas
But i do not see where this argumentation contradicts the the point i made. The reported cases i mentioned are from an Articel series in a major german news magazine (Der Spiegel) about the Echelon network. The problem is once a patent is registered you have a major legal battle at hand to get your invention back. This case has to be made before an american court, which is no easy task for a smaller non american firm. Especially because 'first to invent' is much harder to prove than 'first to file'.
Hope this makes the case a bit more clear.
Thomas
The reasoning behind this was (to my knowledge) to encourage a firm to patend their inventions by giving them the right to use them for themselves for a number of years. To do this they must make the idea or process public. This means they have to share it with everyone. This is IMHO a Good Thing. When the patent expires the knowledge is given to the public for free use.
The Question here is why and when got the process of patents got twisted around and changed to something that is actually hindering progress and not helping it along.
In my opinion this has the following reasons:
1.) The whole patenting process is from a time when technical innovation was moving much slower. The timelines for patents are just to long these days and should be shortened. Or perhaps an evalution process should be used, so that patens will be given to the public domain after a firm made a decent return on investment from them. But this would perhaps lead to another insane buerocratic nightmare :-)
2.) The American patent laws do not have a clause for mandatory licensing. As far as i know this is the case for some European patent Laws. Under this Laws a license must be issued to any firm that applys for one. So a firm can make money by licensing the innovations, but cannot hoard innovations by keeping them for themselves.
3.) The American Government sees strict Patents laws as a way to ensure that dominace of American firms on the world market. There are a reported cases, when obviously stolen patents of non american firms appeared to to be patented in America just before this firms themselves applied for the international patent. As the American goverment once stated openly, it sees industrial espionage as a legimate way to ensure American dominance for key technologies. So the American legislature has a good reason (for them) not to change this laws.
I think the system itself is not completely without reason. But the implementation lends itself to misuse. I'm not sure if the system could be fixed, so big firm cannot use it to stiffle Open Software or competitors. Perhaps it is inherently flawed and should be thrown away. But this would lead to a severe cut in the exchange of ideas beetween commercial operating buissinesses. I dont like patents but i'm not sure, if we wouldn't go from bad to worse by dumping them.
At least there should be clear criteria what is allowed to patend and what not. Buying books with one click should not patentable, this only leads to misuse.
Oh, before i forget. Patents are already hampering the implementation of Free Software in a major field, audio compression. To my knowledge there was once a project under way to specify a new free audio standard that could replace mp3. The project was cancelled because most of the key technologies needed for good, lossy audio compression were already patented und could not be used.
Thomas