How long before Islamic terrorists will use this as a weapon to kill innocent civilians, including women and children?
(modded as 'troll' but I think the moderator missed the tongue in cheek.)
Heck, if it works as advertised, it's already killed the secretary on the floor below and her 3 year old daughter who came in one afternoon when she couldn't get childcare - their hair will start falling out any moment now. It will also have killed the inventer, but such stupidity as voluntarily standing next to an unshielded fusion reactor exempts him from the label "innocent".
This [laying prior claim to an idea without patenting it, to prevent later hostile patenting of it] could all be achieved without government intervention just by publishing in a Journal of No-Longer-Patentable Ideas. (Or web-site.)
Or I could just co-opt Slashdot for the purpose. Here's a couple:
If those RFID tags could be made really cheaply, you could put one on every piece of recyclable packaging (ideally you'd just add some smart-dust to the plastic mix.) Then rubish could be automatically sorted for recycling (whether at the point of initial discarding or at the landfill is an implementation detail.)
You could replace all of the music stands of an orchestra with computer displays (LCD with current technology.) This would display the music, and scroll to keep up with the performance. Ideally the scrolling is done by a computer with a microphone, but if that is too hard, it could be controlled by a human. One computer method is for the computer to have a previous recording of the piece, preferably by the same orchestra/conductor combo, and 'markings' against the recording pointing to the corresponding point in the score. The computer then attempts to correlate the recording with what it is getting through the microphone. There would be allowance for manually resetting it to a certain score location, as would be necessary in rehersal.
There is still a big problem so long as the U.S. is allowing these patents.
Scenario 1: Europe allows software patents. Jan 1990-Jan 2004: Various people around the world use a borderline-patentable idea because it is obvious, but don't try to patent it. Jan 2004: EuroSoft* file to patent the idea in Europe. May 2004: AmeriSoft* file to patent the idea in the US. Jan 2006: EuroSoft's patent is approved, and used to oppress the masses, including AmeriSoft. AmeriSoft's patent is either refused or is toothless because of this.
* All companies in these scenarios are fictional. Any resemblence with real companies of the same name, trading or defunct, is purely coincidental, and their fault for choosing such an obvious company name.
Scenario 2 - Europe does not allow software patents. Jan 1990-Jan 2004: Various people around the world use a borderline-patentable idea because it is obvious, but don't try to patent it. Jan 2004: EuroSoft considers patenting the idea, but would have to do so in the U.S. This would be much harder for them, and it is a long shot anyway that the patent office will be stupid enough to grant it, so they don't. May 2004: AmeriSoft file to patent the idea in the US. May 2006: AmeriSoft's patent is approved, and used to oppress the masses, including EuroSoft.
From our point of view, there isn't much difference between these scenarios, but clearly the European Parliment will prefer scenario 1.
I think what we need is special cheap non-exclusive patents. (Perhaps the name needs working on, as it is somewhat oxymoronic as it stands.) It would not allow the "patent" owner to prevent anyone else using the idea, but would provide assured protection against anyone who filed for a patent on the same idea at a later date.
Scenario 3: Jan 1990-Jan 2004: Various people around the world use a borderline-patentable idea because it is obvious, but don't try to patent it. Jan 2004: EuroSoft* file a non-exclusive patent on the idea in Europe. May 2004: AmeriSoft* file to patent the idea in the US. May 2006: AmeriSoft is unable to oppress EuroSoft because of the patent. Anyone else is able to claim to be using EuroSoft's patent on the idea, not AmeriSoft.
This could all be achieved without government intervention just by publishing in a Journal of No-Longer-Patentable Ideas. (Or web-site. Are there such sites? Easy Karma to the person to post links to some.) As IANAL, I don't know if there would be any benefit in official government recognition via the patent office.
Possibly there could be some allowance for the patents to be used defensively only - i.e. you can only prevent someone using your patent if they are trying to prevent you using one of theirs. I can see a Family Economy-Size Can-o-Worms down this path, but it may still be better than the Barrel-o-Worms we're dealing with now.
Time to unpack my HP46 for old times sake. And my HP19C. And HP65, 67, 97, 45, 32E, 15C, 16C, 21, 25, 28S, 19B, 35. (Actually, it is long enough since I've had them our I don't remember exactly what I've got.)
Certainly it is a reasonable hypothesis that a very massive star might create a black hole when it supernovas. I don't know what the latest computer models say about it, nor do I know how reliable those models are believed to be - this stuff is hard to model right.
Merging neutron stars are also likely to form black holes, and a neutron start that was accreting mass from a companion star could also.
Our best evidence for black holes is for supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies. These would be the result of a long period of growth by swallowing stars. We can't know now where the original 'seed' black hole came from, but the vast majority of its mass did not come from a supernova.
(I have a PhD in astronomy, but haven't done any for 10 years.)
According to my handy textbook*, orangutangs are about twice as diverged from us as chimpanzies. The numbers** here are the number of nucleotide substitutions per 100 sites (i.e. approximately % difference.)
Standard errors on these numbers are about 0.2, so the human/chimp/gorilla differences are not statistically significant. The evidence is growing that the human/chimp split is more recent than the gorilla split, but as far as I know this hasn't yet been determined beyond reasonable doubt.
The numbers in the article are only looking at DNA nucliotides in genes, which change much more slowly then the bulk of DNA which is 'junk'. This is because inside a gene, most mutations will be disadvantageous and selected against. The numbers I give above are from non-coding DNA.
Note that even within genes, not all nucleotide substitutions have any evolutionary effect. There are 4 nucleotides (think letters) which come in groups of 3 (codons, think words) giving 64 possible codons to code for 20 amino acids (plus a little punctuation) so most amino acids have several codons that code for them. Therefore even inside a gene, some nucleotide substitutions will be 'synonymous' - they will not change the protien generated from the gene.
For the purpose of saying "How different (functionally) are we from chimpanzees", it makes most sense to look at how different the proteins are - non-coding DNA and synonymous changes within coding DNA have no effect on phenotype (the critter that the DNA builds.)
For the purpose of timing evolutionary branchings, it makes most sense to look at non-coding DNA and synonymous substitutions. This is because the rate at which substitutions/mutations occur at these sites is much less variable than at coding sites. At coding sites, the rate is constrained by evolutionary pressures, and those pressures may not be the same on different lineages.
Anyway, the story looks like a big yawn to me - this isn't anything we haven't known about for years. There's probably lots of interesting stuff in the details, but not the '99.4%' number. Saying this means were in the same genus is pure sensationalism - the concept of genus is more fuzzy than species, and is fairly arbitrary. There is a fair argument that homo and pan are separate genii(?) only because of parochialism, but this data is not a strong reason to change it.
* I'm studying up for my new job in molecular phylogentics. It will be something of a challenge, given that my degrees are in physics and astronomy.
** Book is Molecular Evolution, Li, 1997. Data is from Li et al 1987.
I'm not a US citizen, but I do have opinions on some of this.
The butterfly ballot: Probably cost Gore the presidency, but the parties had the chance to object to it beforehand, so tough. You can't start reallocating votes by second guessing whether people accidentally misvoted.
The recount: The fair thing to have done would have been a complete state-wide recount. With hindsight, the Democrats should have gone with this rather than asking for just a few, and expecting the Republicans to play the same game. I have no opinion on the legal aspects to this.
The Federal Supreme Court: This was purely a state matter, for all that it had nationwide significance. States control their own elections. The supreme court had no legitimate juristiction. (Had Florida failed to provide delegates to the electral college by the deadline, then it would have been up to the SC to decide whether to wait for them to get their act together, or to elect the president without them.)
Judge Illston: "But it's encrypted. If it doesn't stop being encrypted, it's still encrypted,"
Sallen: It essentially makes copyright permanent. Even after expiration of copyright, the holders of original masters end up with exclusive rights.... All encrypted, nobody has the right to circumvent to copy.
To play devil's advocate:
1) It is only illegal in the USA to circumvent the encryption. If an unencrypted copy is produced in another juristiction and then imported to the USA, the legality is purely based on whether its copyright has expired, so there is no bar to distributing cracked copies once copyright has expired.
2) You can use your 95 year old dvd's still - all you need is a multi-format drive - it is like getting a turntable with a 78 rpm option. I bet they are still available, if you have deep pockets.
3) There is nothing wrong with rereleasing titles in new formats with better quality, and having fresh copyright on the improved version. Right now, you could take a bunch of public domain versions of Hamlet, edit and merge them as you like, and copyright the edited result. This is no different. The originals are still available in the public domain.
IANAL, so the above reasoning could be complete crud.
My first PC had 1K RAM, something like 64x64 pixel display (to TV), and I soldered it myself.
Of course, about a month after I* got it working, we got a 48K Apple II with disk drive - and I can't compete with they guy who started on an IBM 360.
* For large values of "I".
My first computer program (as opposed to HP calculator program) was written in Algol on punch-cards where you poked out the chads with a pencil, then sent them to the local bank and got a print out of the results a few days later.
This is from an editor who we had give a talk at an SF con recently.
One problem is that contracts (at least, those signed before e-books and print-on-demand were anticipated) tend to have clauses giving certain rights back to the author once the book has been out of print for a certain period.
It is ambiguous whether availability as an e-book or print-on-demand book constitutes being 'in print'. Publishers and authors may prefer to avoid the ambiguity. (Of course, they could renegotiate.)
In New Zealand, "stock cars" are very different beasts, but almost as non-stock. They still make left turns around an oval track, but: * The cars cost between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands of dollars * The track is much shorter * The track is dirt * The cars are allowed (in fact, actively encouraged) to hit each other.
One place to start on this is to look at the home page of a computuer geek/stock car racer friend of mine. (Check out the IBM 360 saga also.)
I'm a computer geek without much interest in motor racing, but I watch a fair bit when flatting with a (different) stock car driving friend. My picks for the best racing are: * NZ stock car teams racing (see below) * British touring car racing (these really are stock cars.) * NASCAR et al.
I found F1 very boring - they hardly ever get to overtake. NASCAR was much more interesting than I had anticipated, because the wide track gives so much more opportunity for overtaking.
In New Zealand stock car teams racing, there are two teams, each with 4 cars. The team that first gets *one* of their cars the required distance (typically 8 laps) wins. Remember, they're allowed to hit each other - typically only half the cars are mobile by the end. And missing a wheel doesn't count as immobilized.
I have at home an HP46 - not a printer, but an mid-1970s desktop scientific calculator with printer.
The printer prints onto adding machine tape. From the inside moving out, this is how it works:
1) A rapidly rotating drum with characters embossed on it. 2) The paper 3) Typewriter ribbon 4) A row of hammers, with a smooth concave surface to match the curvature of the drum.
When it prints, the hammers strike at just the right moment so that the desired character is passing by on the drum. If it prints '123456789' it sounds like a machine gun. If it prints '000000000' it makes an almighty 'kachang!'. The volume leaves mere dot matrix printers for dead.
This would be the same supreme court that looked at a law that said police could confiscate your money, house or car just by saying you'd used it for or paid for it from drug dealing, and you could only get it back by suing (at your own expense) in a civil court ("balance of probability" rather than "beyond resonable doubt"), and found that law constitutional?
Freedom in the USA was already dead before the PATRIOT act.
My graduate university spent I think $13M on upgrading the graduate college - about $100K per room. Sure, afterwards, there was no asbestos, there were sprinklers, the heating system no longer did 'elves with sledghammers' imitations in the middle of the night, and the fire alarm system worked so well that on some nights it detected 5 separate non-existent fires. But $100K per ROOM?
(And when we asked them to make a path by putting down some woodchips over the lawn that was getting very muddy, they delayed a couple of months and then layed flagstones. For a path that would become obsolete once the renovations were finished, 6 months later.)
2 brownie points to the first person to name the university... (It is in the USA.)
Over the long term, the sun is indeed getting more luminous, a process that will eventually greatly accelerate as it turns into a red giant. The sun has probably got on the order of 20% more luminous since the formation of the Earth.
However, this is pretty much irrelevant to the issue at hand. The effects of this trend are negligible over small time periods (i.e. millions of years.) (20% in 4 billion years is 0.000 000 005% per year.)
Unfortunately, the article is/.ed, so I can't read it myself.
Speaking from an astronomical background, it sounds to me like there is likely to be problems with noise. It sounds like the system involves some sort of deconvolution, and deconvoluted images are, in my experience, noisy. (Any time we do processing that takes differences between pixel values, we loose on signal-to-noise - the signal subtracts, but the noise adds.)
The/. story seems to me to greatly exagerate the facts.
The letter is a polite request - not a 'cease-and-desist'. All that they ask is that the dictionary entry acknowledge their trademark:
We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the trademark status of Google
Do they have the right to demand this? According to one of the links in the story, probably not. It is polite and sensible for Word Spy to do this? Yes. Have they done this? Yes:
(GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)
Actually, I'd think the more expensive the software, the more likely it is to come on CDR. How many copies of $1M software packages can any company sell? (Oracle and SAP excepted...)
The software company I work for has over 400 staff, and on the order of 10 customers. Each new release is generally used by only 1 or 2 of those customers. We sure ship on CDR.
I remember someone commenting once that we'd cost one of our customers $30,000 by sending the software on CD. Had we just done a file transfer, it would have been exempt from sales tax.
Slashdot Mirror
How long before Islamic terrorists will use this as a weapon to kill innocent civilians, including women and children?
(modded as 'troll' but I think the moderator missed the tongue in cheek.)
Heck, if it works as advertised, it's already killed the secretary on the floor below and her 3 year old daughter who came in one afternoon when she couldn't get childcare - their hair will start falling out any moment now. It will also have killed the inventer, but such stupidity as voluntarily standing next to an unshielded fusion reactor exempts him from the label "innocent".
How come that is moderated "informative" rather than "funny"?
But the English invented the SUV, first registered 2 Jan 1970. Only the name is American.
This [laying prior claim to an idea without patenting it, to prevent later hostile patenting of it] could all be achieved without government intervention just by publishing in a Journal of No-Longer-Patentable Ideas. (Or web-site.)
Or I could just co-opt Slashdot for the purpose. Here's a couple:
If those RFID tags could be made really cheaply, you could put one on every piece of recyclable packaging (ideally you'd just add some smart-dust to the plastic mix.) Then rubish could be automatically sorted for recycling (whether at the point of initial discarding or at the landfill is an implementation detail.)
You could replace all of the music stands of an orchestra with computer displays (LCD with current technology.) This would display the music, and scroll to keep up with the performance. Ideally the scrolling is done by a computer with a microphone, but if that is too hard, it could be controlled by a human. One computer method is for the computer to have a previous recording of the piece, preferably by the same orchestra/conductor combo, and 'markings' against the recording pointing to the corresponding point in the score. The computer then attempts to correlate the recording with what it is getting through the microphone. There would be allowance for manually resetting it to a certain score location, as would be necessary in rehersal.
There is still a big problem so long as the U.S. is allowing these patents.
Scenario 1: Europe allows software patents.
Jan 1990-Jan 2004: Various people around the world use a borderline-patentable idea because it is obvious, but don't try to patent it.
Jan 2004: EuroSoft* file to patent the idea in Europe.
May 2004: AmeriSoft* file to patent the idea in the US.
Jan 2006: EuroSoft's patent is approved, and used to oppress the masses, including AmeriSoft. AmeriSoft's patent is either refused or is toothless because of this.
* All companies in these scenarios are fictional. Any resemblence with real companies of the same name, trading or defunct, is purely coincidental, and their fault for choosing such an obvious company name.
Scenario 2 - Europe does not allow software patents.
Jan 1990-Jan 2004: Various people around the world use a borderline-patentable idea because it is obvious, but don't try to patent it.
Jan 2004: EuroSoft considers patenting the idea, but would have to do so in the U.S. This would be much harder for them, and it is a long shot anyway that the patent office will be stupid enough to grant it, so they don't.
May 2004: AmeriSoft file to patent the idea in the US.
May 2006: AmeriSoft's patent is approved, and used to oppress the masses, including EuroSoft.
From our point of view, there isn't much difference between these scenarios, but clearly the European Parliment will prefer scenario 1.
I think what we need is special cheap non-exclusive patents. (Perhaps the name needs working on, as it is somewhat oxymoronic as it stands.) It would not allow the "patent" owner to prevent anyone else using the idea, but would provide assured protection against anyone who filed for a patent on the same idea at a later date.
Scenario 3:
Jan 1990-Jan 2004: Various people around the world use a borderline-patentable idea because it is obvious, but don't try to patent it.
Jan 2004: EuroSoft* file a non-exclusive patent on the idea in Europe.
May 2004: AmeriSoft* file to patent the idea in the US.
May 2006: AmeriSoft is unable to oppress EuroSoft because of the patent. Anyone else is able to claim to be using EuroSoft's patent on the idea, not AmeriSoft.
This could all be achieved without government intervention just by publishing in a Journal of No-Longer-Patentable Ideas. (Or web-site. Are there such sites? Easy Karma to the person to post links to some.) As IANAL, I don't know if there would be any benefit in official government recognition via the patent office.
Possibly there could be some allowance for the patents to be used defensively only - i.e. you can only prevent someone using your patent if they are trying to prevent you using one of theirs. I can see a Family Economy-Size Can-o-Worms down this path, but it may still be better than the Barrel-o-Worms we're dealing with now.
> Si vis pacem, para bellum
.sig)
Plus honestates in agro arato bene est quam in agro sanguine madido.
(The following is just my
with the "GRAPE" computers. (More links). I expect there are examples going back to the dawn of the computer age.
Wish it was real.
Time to unpack my HP46 for old times sake. And my HP19C. And HP65, 67, 97, 45, 32E, 15C, 16C, 21, 25, 28S, 19B, 35. (Actually, it is long enough since I've had them our I don't remember exactly what I've got.)
You know, it really doesn't make sense for that to be moderated higher than the post to which it was responding.
I don't think this is accurate.
Certainly it is a reasonable hypothesis that a very massive star might create a black hole when it supernovas. I don't know what the latest computer models say about it, nor do I know how reliable those models are believed to be - this stuff is hard to model right.
Merging neutron stars are also likely to form black holes, and a neutron start that was accreting mass from a companion star could also.
Our best evidence for black holes is for supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies. These would be the result of a long period of growth by swallowing stars. We can't know now where the original 'seed' black hole came from, but the vast majority of its mass did not come from a supernova.
(I have a PhD in astronomy, but haven't done any for 10 years.)
This looks like a job for Stupendous Man.
According to my handy textbook*, orangutangs are about twice as diverged from us as chimpanzies. The numbers** here are the number of nucleotide substitutions per 100 sites (i.e. approximately % difference.)
Human-Chimp: 1.45
Human-Gorila: 1.51
Human-Orangutang: 2.98
Gorilla-Chimp: 1.57
Standard errors on these numbers are about 0.2, so the human/chimp/gorilla differences are not statistically significant. The evidence is growing that the human/chimp split is more recent than the gorilla split, but as far as I know this hasn't yet been determined beyond reasonable doubt.
The numbers in the article are only looking at DNA nucliotides in genes, which change much more slowly then the bulk of DNA which is 'junk'. This is because inside a gene, most mutations will be disadvantageous and selected against. The numbers I give above are from non-coding DNA.
Note that even within genes, not all nucleotide substitutions have any evolutionary effect. There are 4 nucleotides (think letters) which come in groups of 3 (codons, think words) giving 64 possible codons to code for 20 amino acids (plus a little punctuation) so most amino acids have several codons that code for them. Therefore even inside a gene, some nucleotide substitutions will be 'synonymous' - they will not change the protien generated from the gene.
For the purpose of saying "How different (functionally) are we from chimpanzees", it makes most sense to look at how different the proteins are - non-coding DNA and synonymous changes within coding DNA have no effect on phenotype (the critter that the DNA builds.)
For the purpose of timing evolutionary branchings, it makes most sense to look at non-coding DNA and synonymous substitutions. This is because the rate at which substitutions/mutations occur at these sites is much less variable than at coding sites. At coding sites, the rate is constrained by evolutionary pressures, and those pressures may not be the same on different lineages.
Anyway, the story looks like a big yawn to me - this isn't anything we haven't known about for years. There's probably lots of interesting stuff in the details, but not the '99.4%' number. Saying this means were in the same genus is pure sensationalism - the concept of genus is more fuzzy than species, and is fairly arbitrary. There is a fair argument that homo and pan are separate genii(?) only because of parochialism, but this data is not a strong reason to change it.
* I'm studying up for my new job in molecular phylogentics. It will be something of a challenge, given that my degrees are in physics and astronomy.
** Book is Molecular Evolution, Li, 1997. Data is from Li et al 1987.
I'm not a US citizen, but I do have opinions on some of this.
The butterfly ballot: Probably cost Gore the presidency, but the parties had the chance to object to it beforehand, so tough. You can't start reallocating votes by second guessing whether people accidentally misvoted.
The recount: The fair thing to have done would have been a complete state-wide recount. With hindsight, the Democrats should have gone with this rather than asking for just a few, and expecting the Republicans to play the same game. I have no opinion on the legal aspects to this.
The Federal Supreme Court: This was purely a state matter, for all that it had nationwide significance. States control their own elections. The supreme court had no legitimate juristiction. (Had Florida failed to provide delegates to the electral college by the deadline, then it would have been up to the SC to decide whether to wait for them to get their act together, or to elect the president without them.)
Judge Illston: "But it's encrypted. If it doesn't stop being encrypted, it's still encrypted,"
... All encrypted, nobody has the right to circumvent to copy.
Sallen: It essentially makes copyright permanent. Even after expiration of copyright, the holders of original masters end up with exclusive rights.
To play devil's advocate:
1) It is only illegal in the USA to circumvent the encryption. If an unencrypted copy is produced in another juristiction and then imported to the USA, the legality is purely based on whether its copyright has expired, so there is no bar to distributing cracked copies once copyright has expired.
2) You can use your 95 year old dvd's still - all you need is a multi-format drive - it is like getting a turntable with a 78 rpm option. I bet they are still available, if you have deep pockets.
3) There is nothing wrong with rereleasing titles in new formats with better quality, and having fresh copyright on the improved version. Right now, you could take a bunch of public domain versions of Hamlet, edit and merge them as you like, and copyright the edited result. This is no different. The originals are still available in the public domain.
IANAL, so the above reasoning could be complete crud.
My first PC had 1K RAM, something like 64x64 pixel display (to TV), and I soldered it myself.
Of course, about a month after I* got it working, we got a 48K Apple II with disk drive - and I can't compete with they guy who started on an IBM 360.
* For large values of "I".
My first computer program (as opposed to HP calculator program) was written in Algol on punch-cards where you poked out the chads with a pencil, then sent them to the local bank and got a print out of the results a few days later.
This is from an editor who we had give a talk at an SF con recently.
One problem is that contracts (at least, those signed before e-books and print-on-demand were anticipated) tend to have clauses giving certain rights back to the author once the book has been out of print for a certain period.
It is ambiguous whether availability as an e-book or print-on-demand book constitutes being 'in print'. Publishers and authors may prefer to avoid the ambiguity. (Of course, they could renegotiate.)
We're getting way off topic here, but:
In New Zealand, "stock cars" are very different beasts, but almost as non-stock. They still make left turns around an oval track, but:
* The cars cost between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands of dollars
* The track is much shorter
* The track is dirt
* The cars are allowed (in fact, actively encouraged) to hit each other.
One place to start on this is to look at the home page of a computuer geek/stock car racer friend of mine. (Check out the IBM 360 saga also.)
I'm a computer geek without much interest in motor racing, but I watch a fair bit when flatting with a (different) stock car driving friend. My picks for the best racing are:
* NZ stock car teams racing (see below)
* British touring car racing (these really are stock cars.)
* NASCAR et al.
I found F1 very boring - they hardly ever get to overtake. NASCAR was much more interesting than I had anticipated, because the wide track gives so much more opportunity for overtaking.
In New Zealand stock car teams racing, there are two teams, each with 4 cars. The team that first gets *one* of their cars the required distance (typically 8 laps) wins. Remember, they're allowed to hit each other - typically only half the cars are mobile by the end. And missing a wheel doesn't count as immobilized.
I have at home an HP46 - not a printer, but an mid-1970s desktop scientific calculator with printer.
The printer prints onto adding machine tape. From the inside moving out, this is how it works:
1) A rapidly rotating drum with characters embossed on it.
2) The paper
3) Typewriter ribbon
4) A row of hammers, with a smooth concave surface to match the curvature of the drum.
When it prints, the hammers strike at just the right moment so that the desired character is passing by on the drum. If it prints '123456789' it sounds like a machine gun. If it prints '000000000' it makes an almighty 'kachang!'. The volume leaves mere dot matrix printers for dead.
This would be the same supreme court that looked at a law that said police could confiscate your money, house or car just by saying you'd used it for or paid for it from drug dealing, and you could only get it back by suing (at your own expense) in a civil court ("balance of probability" rather than "beyond resonable doubt"), and found that law constitutional?
Freedom in the USA was already dead before the PATRIOT act.
Congratulations. You have won two brownie points.
For those who enjoy solving simple substitution
cyphers, the following command will encypher a file for you:
perl -0777pe'$a="a";s/[a-z]/$b{lc$&}||=$a++/gei' filename
I also have a program to help solve these cyphers, but it is too long to fit into the margin of this post.
(And if you don't like solving alphametics problems (e.g. SEND+MORE=MONEY), I have a program that will do it for you in 135 bytes.)
I can't quite match your class ring story, but:
My graduate university spent I think $13M on upgrading the graduate college - about $100K per room. Sure, afterwards, there was no asbestos, there were sprinklers, the heating system no longer did 'elves with sledghammers' imitations in the middle of the night, and the fire alarm system worked so well that on some nights it detected 5 separate non-existent fires. But $100K per ROOM?
(And when we asked them to make a path by putting down some woodchips over the lawn that was getting very muddy, they delayed a couple of months and then layed flagstones. For a path that would become obsolete once the renovations were finished, 6 months later.)
2 brownie points to the first person to name the university... (It is in the USA.)
As an aside to this discussion:
Over the long term, the sun is indeed getting more luminous, a process that will eventually greatly accelerate as it turns into a red giant. The sun has probably got on the order of 20% more luminous since the formation of the Earth.
However, this is pretty much irrelevant to the issue at hand. The effects of this trend are negligible over small time periods (i.e. millions of years.) (20% in 4 billion years is 0.000 000 005% per year.)
Unfortunately, the article is /.ed, so I can't read it myself.
Speaking from an astronomical background, it sounds to me like there is likely to be problems with noise. It sounds like the system involves some sort of deconvolution, and deconvoluted images are, in my experience, noisy. (Any time we do processing that takes differences between pixel values, we loose on signal-to-noise - the signal subtracts, but the noise adds.)
Does this system suffer from increased noise?
The /. story seems to me to greatly exagerate the facts.
The letter is a polite request - not a 'cease-and-desist'. All that they ask is that the dictionary entry acknowledge their trademark:
We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the trademark status of Google
Do they have the right to demand this? According to one of the links in the story, probably not. It is polite and sensible for Word Spy to do this? Yes. Have they done this? Yes:
(GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)
Actually, I'd think the more expensive the software, the more likely it is to come on CDR. How many copies of $1M software packages can any company sell? (Oracle and SAP excepted...)
The software company I work for has over 400 staff, and on the order of 10 customers. Each new release is generally used by only 1 or 2 of those customers. We sure ship on CDR.
I remember someone commenting once that we'd cost one of our customers $30,000 by sending the software on CD. Had we just done a file transfer, it would have been exempt from sales tax.