The conflict is also a cultural one, as far as I can see. ISTM that China has long been a "hive" culture, where everyone is expected to work for the good of all. The notion of an individual owning something as conceptual as an idea or a design really does seem to be alien to them, and their IPR legislation is quite new (and, I think, conceptually infamiliar to most of them), introduced reluctantly for the sake of world trade. They are unlikely to see anything wrong with using Disney images and ideas, because they genuinely don't think of images and ideas as things that can be "owned"; they don't see this as "stealing" any more than I think I am "stealing" somebody else's air by breathing. Those cultural patterns might not fit well with capitalism (though I expect the FSF, for example, would argue that they can be made to work together) -- but then, they're pretty new to capitalism, too.
The KJV is "Crown Copyright" (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/advice/crown-copyright/ind ex.htm), ie, not copyrighted by an individual but by the monarchy. Presumably it would go into public domain 80 years after the UK became a republic, but I bet that the incoming republican government would outdo Disney in its attempts to maintain copyright on government documents (which is what Crown Copyright mainly applies to). Most of the rest of the world doesn't acknowledge Crown Copyright, but we have to here in the UK!
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, must check. I was sure it was Feynman, but as the Bard pointed out "old men forget". Somebody wrote in their biography that they did it!
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you don't take action on this, you've forfeited your right to ever post moronic "Teh RIAA is suing teh singal mothers!" comments again. Hey, I'd love to, because there are some great US-based internet radio stations I love to listen to. Could you remind me who my Congressman/woman is here in London, England? Oh, wait, I'd come under foreign affairs, wouldn't I? Secretary Rice seems terribly busy right now, I'll just have to keep posting those moronic "Teh RIAA is suing teh singal mothers!" comments anyway.
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
According to his biog, the physicist Richard Feynman did that when he was conscripted. He struck out the bit about obeying orders. IIRC, the army didn't even notice until he refused to obey an order and pointed it out when challenged. IIRC, all they could do was boot him out of the army again.
Of course, in that case being booted out was an acceptable outcome. Probably not if you're applying for a job.
I should add, by the way, that most of the bloat is on the developer's machine, because of the huge libraries. The user only needs the runtime, and only one copy of it. That would be bloat if they only ran one small.NET application, but not if they run lots of.NET apps.
.NET encompasses the API (actually a huge set of APIs), as well as a virtual machine (known as the Common Language Runtime, CLR), as well as a set of languages (like C# and VB.NET) and a whole lot of infrastructure designed to support those languages and the applications written in them.[/quote]
Yes, I was simplifying wildly because there was no way I could reproduce all those diagrams in the documentation in a/. posting:-)
Such a system can certainly be made portable, and Java did that (but with a single official programming language) before.NET came along. But you're probably correct that the Windows-specificity of.NET means that making it truly portable is a dubious proposition, on many levels. In a sense,.NET is the new version of the Windows API. Well, the Microsoft specific stuff should all me in the libraries that begin "Microsoft". Looking at them there's some interesting stuff -- I hadn't realised that the Microsoft C# compiler is actually a.NET class, so I could have an instance of it in my Ada programme -- but I can't see anything in there that I'd need for anything remotely mainstream.
BTW, any programmer worth his salt shouldn't have had a problem understanding what.NET is. However, Microsoft needed to market it beyond that group because.NET was so central to the future direction of Windows. The confusion you noticed was the result of that rather challenging marketing problem. Quite. So in fact, lots of programmers worth their salt are left completely bewildered, because the MS marketing stuff gives no idea of what.NET is or what it does, so they never bother reading further into the real documentation (why should they?)
Well, there's still the penalty from GC, and that one is harder to account for - but still, there really isn't much reason to pick C++ over C# for speed, unless you really really need that 3-5% extra. If you're choosing between C++ and C# runnung under.NET then C# may have the edge, being closer to the VM language, but it's a tough call because of the GC issue (and because C++ optimisation is pretty mature).
It probably is an enormous amount of time and energy to port it -- ask the Mono folks. The benefit is code portability across platforms. That's why Tk/Tcl has been ported to multiple platforms, that's why wxWidgets has been ported to multiple platforms, heck, it's even why Java Swing has been ported to multiple platforms. And they're (mainly) just the GUI side of things;.NET offers a lot of other stuff too. Of course, it's the "lot of other stuff" that causes the bloat. Remember, it's not just an API, it's a virtual machine, which in theory looks the same on every platform. "In theory" because there's the little issue of what Microsoft will allow to be ported, and even MS have the sense to realise that complete platform transparency is pretty much impossible so there are some platform specific elements to the API.
No. As I see it (and there's more than one way to see it).NET is essentially an API and virtual machine offering that API. C# happens to be a high level language that maps very closely onto the virtual machine language, but in theory any language can compile to that machine language (and many do -- C++, Java, VB, Python, Ada, Eiffel, and so on). I like it as an API (at least at version 2.x), the VM makes multi-language programming a cinch, its memory manager really does seem to eliminate a lot of classic memory bugs, and its deployment model moves away from huge, centralised registries. But it comes at the expense of bloat and the speed penalty of an extra layer between the code and the metal. IMHO that's a reasonable design choice to have to make. If you're developing for MS Windows I reckon.NET is a decent design choice as long as you're not particularly size or speed constrained. If you're developing for anything else -- well, try starting here: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/133 6216&from=rss.
With a strong encryption standard, any restaurant could take any card -- assuming your available balance was high enough, of course. We could easily get to the point where "which card" is always only a matter of personal choice, since every restaurant would take every card, so they don't think it's worth mentioning.
That seems to be pretty much the case in Zurich -- when I was there I didn't see any of the lists of acceptable cards in shop and restaurant windows, because, as it turns out, pretty much everyone takes pretty much any card.
But it isn't only the customer's credit standing that matters; I know lots of smaller traders who struggle to negotiate with the card issuers to be allowed to accept their cards (and to negotiate acceptable rates, which vary trader by trader). Visa does at least act as a central point for being able to accept a vast number of cards internationally, whereas if the trader had to negotiate with each card issuer then all but the huge international companies would probably only bother accepting a few local cards.
Firstly, they don't claim that they're the right "lyrics", merely that they're from the right period.
Secondly, the notion of "right lyrics" doesn't really apply because it's hardly unknown -- and hardly new -- for hymns to be sung to any tune that fits. It may not even have been metrical (as we think of it) at that time and place, so any words could have been matched to the tune at the choirmaster's whim. Anglican chant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_chant is a bit too recent for the Rosslyn Chapel, but it gives you the idea of how that sort of thing works. The sort of song structure that Anglican Chant was designed to deal with with goes back at least as far as Caedmon's Hymn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A6dmon#C.C3.A6dm on.27s_Hymn, or even Beowulf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf if you think that was sung. Easily early enough for Rosslyn Chapel (by about a thousand years) but the article doesn't give enough detail for me to be sure whether that's what was going on here.
It's the sort of thing that can get noticed and forgotten about again, so I don't think the date that Chladni got his name attached to it is particularly significant. After all, it's hardly high tech.
My understanding is that MS retained IPR on.NET 2.0 features (including CLR support for generics) and they could hit Mono for the 2.0 features any time they wanted. Access to those features is worth something.
Then do something about it! Run for office yourself. Setup your own party. Try to convince people to vote for the existing third-parties.
Will any of those be successful? Who can say? But I give them a much bigger chance of success then apathy....
No they would not be successful, because all I'd do would be split the existing minority vote (and not by much, because I'd make a lousy politician).
Running for office and apathy are not the only alternatives. Kicking up a fuss about government moves to which I object is one thing; if the public become more aware of the issues then maybe it could become an election item (or maybe I could turn out to be a crackpot). I'm also a member of Liberty (roughly, the UK equivalent of the ACLU) who mount publicity campaigns and legal challenges against infringements of our liberties. There's plenty that can be done between elections.
I think they might be on to at least a few of the British accents at the University of East Anglia. Rather than accents being the issue, I wonder how many languages the system will have to recognise? After all, most of the terrorist problems we've had recently have been from groups with easy access to other world languages. Assuming the cameras really are about terrorism, not something else entirely.
A good low tech option in my mind would be to vote the dumbasses out of power that think this is a good idea.
Unfortunately, many of us see these particular dumbasses as muscling in on the rival dumbasses' territory -- any likely alternative is probably going to be just as bad or worse. Yes, there are minority parties I can vote for, but there are enough people who reckon that if you're doing nothing wrong there's nothing to fear [1] that those parties don't have much chance. As somebody said a couple of elections ago, we're faced with a choice of being forced to eat s*** and being forced to eat s*** with razor-blades.
[1] True enough -- provided that all those with access to the data are and always will be benign and competent...
The Visa logo lets the cashier know that his store does (or does not) trust the bank on the other end of the transaction. It works the other way too -- it lets the customer know that the establishment trusts the bank on the other end of the transaction. I wouldn't like to order and eat a meal in a fancy restaurant and only discover when the time came to pay whether the establishment would accept my credit card!
For my part, I won't be satisfied until the story says that the papers dissolving the corporation have been filed. Fwiw.
Even that wouldn't be enough, because their supposed IPR would be sold to the highest bidder and the whole thing could continue. Although with any luck their price would be so low by then that we could just pass the hat around on slashdot...
Amnesty's "problem" would also be solved. It isn't Amnesty's problem, it's based on a UN definition of "child soldier". Changing the UK voting age wouldn't change the UN's position (http://www.unicef.org/protection/childsoldiers.pd f.
Slashdot Mirror
The conflict is also a cultural one, as far as I can see. ISTM that China has long been a "hive" culture, where everyone is expected to work for the good of all. The notion of an individual owning something as conceptual as an idea or a design really does seem to be alien to them, and their IPR legislation is quite new (and, I think, conceptually infamiliar to most of them), introduced reluctantly for the sake of world trade. They are unlikely to see anything wrong with using Disney images and ideas, because they genuinely don't think of images and ideas as things that can be "owned"; they don't see this as "stealing" any more than I think I am "stealing" somebody else's air by breathing. Those cultural patterns might not fit well with capitalism (though I expect the FSF, for example, would argue that they can be made to work together) -- but then, they're pretty new to capitalism, too.
The KJV is "Crown Copyright" (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/advice/crown-copyright/ind ex.htm), ie, not copyrighted by an individual but by the monarchy. Presumably it would go into public domain 80 years after the UK became a republic, but I bet that the incoming republican government would outdo Disney in its attempts to maintain copyright on government documents (which is what Crown Copyright mainly applies to). Most of the rest of the world doesn't acknowledge Crown Copyright, but we have to here in the UK!
Hmm, must check. I was sure it was Feynman, but as the Bard pointed out "old men forget". Somebody wrote in their biography that they did it!
According to his biog, the physicist Richard Feynman did that when he was conscripted. He struck out the bit about obeying orders. IIRC, the army didn't even notice until he refused to obey an order and pointed it out when challenged. IIRC, all they could do was boot him out of the army again.
Of course, in that case being booted out was an acceptable outcome. Probably not if you're applying for a job.
...is a written constitution, just like Europe. Oh, hold on, that's the wrong way around, isn't it?
I should add, by the way, that most of the bloat is on the developer's machine, because of the huge libraries. The user only needs the runtime, and only one copy of it. That would be bloat if they only ran one small .NET application, but not if they run lots of .NET apps.
.NET encompasses the API (actually a huge set of APIs), as well as a virtual machine (known as the Common Language Runtime, CLR), as well as a set of languages (like C# and VB.NET) and a whole lot of infrastructure designed to support those languages and the applications written in them.[/quote] Yes, I was simplifying wildly because there was no way I could reproduce all those diagrams in the documentation in aIt probably is an enormous amount of time and energy to port it -- ask the Mono folks. The benefit is code portability across platforms. That's why Tk/Tcl has been ported to multiple platforms, that's why wxWidgets has been ported to multiple platforms, heck, it's even why Java Swing has been ported to multiple platforms. And they're (mainly) just the GUI side of things; .NET offers a lot of other stuff too. Of course, it's the "lot of other stuff" that causes the bloat. Remember, it's not just an API, it's a virtual machine, which in theory looks the same on every platform. "In theory" because there's the little issue of what Microsoft will allow to be ported, and even MS have the sense to realise that complete platform transparency is pretty much impossible so there are some platform specific elements to the API.
No. As I see it (and there's more than one way to see it) .NET is essentially an API and virtual machine offering that API. C# happens to be a high level language that maps very closely onto the virtual machine language, but in theory any language can compile to that machine language (and many do -- C++, Java, VB, Python, Ada, Eiffel, and so on). I like it as an API (at least at version 2.x), the VM makes multi-language programming a cinch, its memory manager really does seem to eliminate a lot of classic memory bugs, and its deployment model moves away from huge, centralised registries. But it comes at the expense of bloat and the speed penalty of an extra layer between the code and the metal. IMHO that's a reasonable design choice to have to make. If you're developing for MS Windows I reckon .NET is a decent design choice as long as you're not particularly size or speed constrained. If you're developing for anything else -- well, try starting here: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/133 6216&from=rss.
Mine is divisible by four primes. Does that make it four times as valuable?
That seems to be pretty much the case in Zurich -- when I was there I didn't see any of the lists of acceptable cards in shop and restaurant windows, because, as it turns out, pretty much everyone takes pretty much any card.
But it isn't only the customer's credit standing that matters; I know lots of smaller traders who struggle to negotiate with the card issuers to be allowed to accept their cards (and to negotiate acceptable rates, which vary trader by trader). Visa does at least act as a central point for being able to accept a vast number of cards internationally, whereas if the trader had to negotiate with each card issuer then all but the huge international companies would probably only bother accepting a few local cards.
Firstly, they don't claim that they're the right "lyrics", merely that they're from the right period.
Secondly, the notion of "right lyrics" doesn't really apply because it's hardly unknown -- and hardly new -- for hymns to be sung to any tune that fits. It may not even have been metrical (as we think of it) at that time and place, so any words could have been matched to the tune at the choirmaster's whim. Anglican chant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_chant is a bit too recent for the Rosslyn Chapel, but it gives you the idea of how that sort of thing works. The sort of song structure that Anglican Chant was designed to deal with with goes back at least as far as Caedmon's Hymn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A6dmon#C.C3.A6dm on.27s_Hymn, or even Beowulf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf if you think that was sung. Easily early enough for Rosslyn Chapel (by about a thousand years) but the article doesn't give enough detail for me to be sure whether that's what was going on here.
It's the sort of thing that can get noticed and forgotten about again, so I don't think the date that Chladni got his name attached to it is particularly significant. After all, it's hardly high tech.
My understanding is that MS retained IPR on .NET 2.0 features (including CLR support for generics) and they could hit Mono for the 2.0 features any time they wanted. Access to those features is worth something.
Then do something about it! Run for office yourself. Setup your own party. Try to convince people to vote for the existing third-parties.
Will any of those be successful? Who can say? But I give them a much bigger chance of success then apathy....
No they would not be successful, because all I'd do would be split the existing minority vote (and not by much, because I'd make a lousy politician).
Running for office and apathy are not the only alternatives. Kicking up a fuss about government moves to which I object is one thing; if the public become more aware of the issues then maybe it could become an election item (or maybe I could turn out to be a crackpot). I'm also a member of Liberty (roughly, the UK equivalent of the ACLU) who mount publicity campaigns and legal challenges against infringements of our liberties. There's plenty that can be done between elections.
I think they might be on to at least a few of the British accents at the University of East Anglia. Rather than accents being the issue, I wonder how many languages the system will have to recognise? After all, most of the terrorist problems we've had recently have been from groups with easy access to other world languages. Assuming the cameras really are about terrorism, not something else entirely.
Unfortunately, many of us see these particular dumbasses as muscling in on the rival dumbasses' territory -- any likely alternative is probably going to be just as bad or worse. Yes, there are minority parties I can vote for, but there are enough people who reckon that if you're doing nothing wrong there's nothing to fear [1] that those parties don't have much chance. As somebody said a couple of elections ago, we're faced with a choice of being forced to eat s*** and being forced to eat s*** with razor-blades.
[1] True enough -- provided that all those with access to the data are and always will be benign and competent...
For my part, I won't be satisfied until the story says that the papers dissolving the corporation have been filed. Fwiw.
Even that wouldn't be enough, because their supposed IPR would be sold to the highest bidder and the whole thing could continue. Although with any luck their price would be so low by then that we could just pass the hat around on slashdot...