The problem is that it's almost impossible to avoid them - there are extremely software broad patents covering mostly everything. Open standards aren't a cure, just that a standard is open doesn't mean anything, you can still be sued.
As far as I understand, Microsoft was never very active on the patent front, as has never sued anyone on patent grounds (except perhaps as retaliation). However, in recent years they've been very aggressive in getting them.
That last paragraph could make it sound like they're only getting them because they have to defend themselves, but Microsoft is one of the companies pushing extremely hard for software patents in Europe. So it's more a case of them finally noticing an opportunity, and wanting to join the party... there's a lot of open standards implemented by open source that could suffer in the future.
Different topic. I know this is slashdot, and there are a lot of IT professionals who frequent this site, but I'm a little confused. What is even mildly complicated about IT?
"IT" is an extremely broad term - it's used for "everything that has to do with computers." It ranges from adminning a few Windows computers to designing the software for the Mars rovers.
Secondly, almost all that work usually involves problem solving on a daily basis. Say your four windows computers network has glitches, it's dropping packets - the manual isn't going to help if you're not used to methodically finding the cause of a problem. And that is analytical thinking (think of the things that might be going wrong, think up a way to test whether that's the problem, try to think of what other things may be going wrong given the outcome of that test, etc etc).
A degree in computer science generally isn't a degree in hardware, or in Microsoft Windows.
Some very good programmers I work with have no ability to use a computer above and beyond the compiler, and a few unix commands.
And a degree in computer science isn't necessarily a degree in programming either. I know some extremely good computer scientists who can hardly program. Dijkstra himself didn't use computers much.
The funny thing is that that fixed bound on the uncertainty is actually defined in terms of Planck's constant, the number we're talking about... so what's the fixed uncertainty of the fixed uncertainty?:-)
It's exactly that, the arrogance of not having any clue about the actual math involved, but still claiming to be able to tell which statements "feel right" and which don't.
I vote for either the Brentford trilogy (The Antipope / The Brentford Triangle / East of Ealing, and possibly including The Sprouts of Wrath and The Brentford Chain Store Massacre). Or otherwise the Armageddon trilogy (Armageddon the Musical / They Came and Ate Us - Armageddon II the B-Movie / Suburban Book of the Dead - Armageddon III the Remake).
Actually no, that's far too much for a film of course. I recommend those as starting points for people who want to start reading Rankin. The Brentford stuff is just really silly, the Armageddon stuff is just incredibly silly. Most of the later books are basically 80% running in-jokes.
I dunno. I'm not for nazi ideals nor what they stood for, however, they ARE a part of history, a big part of Germany's history. Isn't it often said, those that don't learn from the past are destined to repeat it? Well, if you try to completely eradicate parts of the past, and censor it into oblivion, then how can future generations learn from it to avoid it?
What would happen in the US if there were regular demonstrations of hundreds of people out on the street proclaiming that 9/11 was a wonderful thing and that more unbelievers should be killed? I think Nazi propaganda in Germany is about equally sensitive.
Yes, it's the New Economy! It wasn't really gone - that downcycle was just part of it. Everything free (supported by ads for other free services, supported by ads for the first free service), buying up blog companies and other things that loads of people use for free, it's The Future! Once more!
The New Economy is really different from the Old Economy - for one thing, companies don't need to make any profits, earnings or even have a business plan, but we knew that already. The other thing is that it leads to a total stock market crash every eight years! It's The Future.
But doesn't that cost insane amounts of money, I hear you ask, investing billions in no-brains companies every few years, losing it all, starting all over "because the VCs must invest in something, or give the money back to investors!"
Yes, but (and you can sing along, as you do know the words) - we'll make it up in volume! Over and over and over again...
"In any argument, there are always at least four sides to the story: your side, his side, the Truth, and what really happened." -- can't remember whose quote I just probably misremembered
And the other fact you need to face is that modelers spends hours and hours tweaking their models until they "look right", and if "humans are the cause of global warming" is what looks right to them (and they get paid to get that result) then that is what the models say.
Perhaps this is true. But those on the other side do it as well - they also train their "there's no problem" models to fit all the weather data that is available.
Which is why this particular study is so very important - they didn't tweak the models, they took a bunch of existing tweaked models and applied them to another set of data. The models made predictions about ocean temperatures, but hadn't been tweaked with them.
And it turns out that the predictions of the "the greenhouse effect is currently causing warming" models were very close to the actual measurements, and the predictions of the "it's volcanic activity / a solar cycle / natural fluctuations in weather" models totally failed.
This study addresses exactly that criticism of yours, and it blows it away.
My TV broke a few years back, I decided I didn't miss it, never bought another.
I watch TV sometimes, when visiting people. I often get remarks like "you don't watch tv often, do you?" because I tend to laugh at every other commercial...
Is that really going to teach them to do it right, or are they going to add "permanately maiming innocent bystanders" to buisness expenses?
FWIW, they were employed by the students living in the block of flats (student dorms). They will never, ever, do it again, they were shocked. They paid two months of wages each, to pay for part of the sum; the rest nearly bankrupted the student's association that employed them, and a higher fee would have come out of the personal pockets of the volunteers running the association. It wasn't a commercial entity.
You forget that ever since WW1, part of war is the mass killing of people from the other side without direct gain for your own side. In WW1 that was still pretty limited.
In WW2, killing civilians in huge numbers became a large part of the war machine. Forget about the front, you need to kill civilians in the other country's cities, by the millions. That's modern warfare - bomb the other country, hit civilians instead of military because they're easier to hit.
That reached its logical conclusion with the atomic bomb (and hydrogen bomb), and having thousands of them on missiles that can't be blocked. That stops war - two countries with sufficient nuclear missiles cannot go to war with each other. At least, it'll be over quickly if they do, taking the rest of them with us. India and Pakistan at least grew friendlier very quickly once they both had the bomb.
America has been involved in many skirmishes since WW2, but never any real full out wars on the scale of WW2 or WW1. As more and more countries develop the bomb, there will be ever less opportunity to attack small countries like they're doing now.
I don't know him well, but he's 20-ish so he probably did do sports.
Anyways, if he had 110,000 or 1,1 million, he'd still not feel any less pain, so I don't see why any of those amounts are automatically more justified.
Exactly. I live in the Netherlands, and have been pretty close to a case where cleaners threw a sofa to the ground from a balcony, 8 stories up. There was an area they had put warnings signs around, put it was a pretty light sofa, the wind caught it, and it hit somebody who was taken to hospital. The victim was very lucky, his back and shoulder were hit but it could have been much worse. His back healed, but he has limited use of his shoulder (keeps pain, movement somewhat limited), and this will not heal. There was a civil suit, but it was eventually settled, at about 11,000 euro.
Also, in the Netherlands, lawyers aren't allowed to work on a "no cure, no pay" basis, since that would lead to frivolous damage law suits - although this is slowly changing, experiments with allowing it are being held, I believe.
I really can't see how legalizing drugs would keep people from 1) becoming addicted, 2) losing jobs because of their addiction, and 3) resorting to stealing because they can't find work.
First, we *know* that keeping it illegal doesn't do any of those things either, plus it makes people involved in drugs violent as well, since they have cops hunting them.
Second, it makes addicts more approachable for regular medical help, if they need it. In the Netherlands, possession (for own use) and use of drugs are not illegal, only drug trade is. Heavy addicts can get free doses of methadon, a heroin substitute. There are lots of resocializing programs.
Sale of so-called "soft" drugs (i.e., weed), isn't officially legal but it's "tolerated". That's because they are really no problem, and selling them in their own stores keeps weed smokers away from the hard stuff. Legalizing it is impossible because of pressure from other countries.
In short, the Dutch policy is extremely pragmatic. Other countries are mostly legalistic. I believe that the drug problem in the Netherlands is much smaller than in other Western countries.
(3) Creationism. This is not a serious option anywhere in the Western world, but a large percentage of smart Americans still think that evolution is doubtful and that creationism is a real competitor.
As you say, the difference between the US and elsewhere is odd.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that it's almost impossible to avoid them - there are extremely software broad patents covering mostly everything. Open standards aren't a cure, just that a standard is open doesn't mean anything, you can still be sued.
As far as I understand, Microsoft was never very active on the patent front, as has never sued anyone on patent grounds (except perhaps as retaliation). However, in recent years they've been very aggressive in getting them.
That last paragraph could make it sound like they're only getting them because they have to defend themselves, but Microsoft is one of the companies pushing extremely hard for software patents in Europe. So it's more a case of them finally noticing an opportunity, and wanting to join the party... there's a lot of open standards implemented by open source that could suffer in the future.
Different topic. I know this is slashdot, and there are a lot of IT professionals who frequent this site, but I'm a little confused. What is even mildly complicated about IT?
"IT" is an extremely broad term - it's used for "everything that has to do with computers." It ranges from adminning a few Windows computers to designing the software for the Mars rovers.
Secondly, almost all that work usually involves problem solving on a daily basis. Say your four windows computers network has glitches, it's dropping packets - the manual isn't going to help if you're not used to methodically finding the cause of a problem. And that is analytical thinking (think of the things that might be going wrong, think up a way to test whether that's the problem, try to think of what other things may be going wrong given the outcome of that test, etc etc).
A degree in computer science generally isn't a degree in hardware, or in Microsoft Windows.
Some very good programmers I work with have no ability to use a computer above and beyond the compiler, and a few unix commands.
And a degree in computer science isn't necessarily a degree in programming either. I know some extremely good computer scientists who can hardly program. Dijkstra himself didn't use computers much.
Base-12 is far superior to base-10.
I thought everyone agreed that base-10 was perfect, they just don't agree which base "10" is in...
The funny thing is that that fixed bound on the uncertainty is actually defined in terms of Planck's constant, the number we're talking about... so what's the fixed uncertainty of the fixed uncertainty? :-)
It's exactly that, the arrogance of not having any clue about the actual math involved, but still claiming to be able to tell which statements "feel right" and which don't.
I vote for either the Brentford trilogy (The Antipope / The Brentford Triangle / East of Ealing, and possibly including The Sprouts of Wrath and The Brentford Chain Store Massacre). Or otherwise the Armageddon trilogy (Armageddon the Musical / They Came and Ate Us - Armageddon II the B-Movie / Suburban Book of the Dead - Armageddon III the Remake).
Actually no, that's far too much for a film of course. I recommend those as starting points for people who want to start reading Rankin. The Brentford stuff is just really silly, the Armageddon stuff is just incredibly silly. Most of the later books are basically 80% running in-jokes.
I dunno. I'm not for nazi ideals nor what they stood for, however, they ARE a part of history, a big part of Germany's history. Isn't it often said, those that don't learn from the past are destined to repeat it? Well, if you try to completely eradicate parts of the past, and censor it into oblivion, then how can future generations learn from it to avoid it?
What would happen in the US if there were regular demonstrations of hundreds of people out on the street proclaiming that 9/11 was a wonderful thing and that more unbelievers should be killed? I think Nazi propaganda in Germany is about equally sensitive.
Note that there are actually three different parsings of "time flies like an arrow":
There are quite a few motherboards that can handle 16G (or 32G) memory, they're mostly dual/quad Opteron boards. Tyan has a line.
If you also want PCIe x16, it's harder - Tyan lists this baby (Thunder K8WE), but I don't know if that one is actually available already.
Yes, it's the New Economy! It wasn't really gone - that downcycle was just part of it. Everything free (supported by ads for other free services, supported by ads for the first free service), buying up blog companies and other things that loads of people use for free, it's The Future! Once more!
The New Economy is really different from the Old Economy - for one thing, companies don't need to make any profits, earnings or even have a business plan, but we knew that already. The other thing is that it leads to a total stock market crash every eight years! It's The Future.
But doesn't that cost insane amounts of money, I hear you ask, investing billions in no-brains companies every few years, losing it all, starting all over "because the VCs must invest in something, or give the money back to investors!"
Yes, but (and you can sing along, as you do know the words) - we'll make it up in volume! Over and over and over again...
BTW my home server has the SAME setup
Your home server setup would be ILLEGAL in a data center because the circuit breaker is required to take off all the power, for use in case of a fire.
All volcanic activity on Mars has ceased.
That page you linked to was last changed in 1997. Nowadays we know more (that link is just the first hit in Google for 'mars volcanoes dormant').
"In any argument, there are always at least four sides to the story: your side, his side, the Truth, and what really happened." -- can't remember whose quote I just probably misremembered
Also, not every Informative mod point given is serious. I love that sort of thing.
And the other fact you need to face is that modelers spends hours and hours tweaking their models until they "look right", and if "humans are the cause of global warming" is what looks right to them (and they get paid to get that result) then that is what the models say.
Perhaps this is true. But those on the other side do it as well - they also train their "there's no problem" models to fit all the weather data that is available.
Which is why this particular study is so very important - they didn't tweak the models, they took a bunch of existing tweaked models and applied them to another set of data. The models made predictions about ocean temperatures, but hadn't been tweaked with them.
And it turns out that the predictions of the "the greenhouse effect is currently causing warming" models were very close to the actual measurements, and the predictions of the "it's volcanic activity / a solar cycle / natural fluctuations in weather" models totally failed.
This study addresses exactly that criticism of yours, and it blows it away.
My TV broke a few years back, I decided I didn't miss it, never bought another.
I watch TV sometimes, when visiting people. I often get remarks like "you don't watch tv often, do you?" because I tend to laugh at every other commercial...
Is that really going to teach them to do it right, or are they going to add "permanately maiming innocent bystanders" to buisness expenses?
FWIW, they were employed by the students living in the block of flats (student dorms). They will never, ever, do it again, they were shocked. They paid two months of wages each, to pay for part of the sum; the rest nearly bankrupted the student's association that employed them, and a higher fee would have come out of the personal pockets of the volunteers running the association. It wasn't a commercial entity.
You forget that ever since WW1, part of war is the mass killing of people from the other side without direct gain for your own side. In WW1 that was still pretty limited.
In WW2, killing civilians in huge numbers became a large part of the war machine. Forget about the front, you need to kill civilians in the other country's cities, by the millions. That's modern warfare - bomb the other country, hit civilians instead of military because they're easier to hit.
That reached its logical conclusion with the atomic bomb (and hydrogen bomb), and having thousands of them on missiles that can't be blocked. That stops war - two countries with sufficient nuclear missiles cannot go to war with each other. At least, it'll be over quickly if they do, taking the rest of them with us. India and Pakistan at least grew friendlier very quickly once they both had the bomb.
America has been involved in many skirmishes since WW2, but never any real full out wars on the scale of WW2 or WW1. As more and more countries develop the bomb, there will be ever less opportunity to attack small countries like they're doing now.
I don't know him well, but he's 20-ish so he probably did do sports.
Anyways, if he had 110,000 or 1,1 million, he'd still not feel any less pain, so I don't see why any of those amounts are automatically more justified.
Exactly. I live in the Netherlands, and have been pretty close to a case where cleaners threw a sofa to the ground from a balcony, 8 stories up. There was an area they had put warnings signs around, put it was a pretty light sofa, the wind caught it, and it hit somebody who was taken to hospital. The victim was very lucky, his back and shoulder were hit but it could have been much worse. His back healed, but he has limited use of his shoulder (keeps pain, movement somewhat limited), and this will not heal. There was a civil suit, but it was eventually settled, at about 11,000 euro.
Also, in the Netherlands, lawyers aren't allowed to work on a "no cure, no pay" basis, since that would lead to frivolous damage law suits - although this is slowly changing, experiments with allowing it are being held, I believe.
I really can't see how legalizing drugs would keep people from 1) becoming addicted, 2) losing jobs because of their addiction, and 3) resorting to stealing because they can't find work.
First, we *know* that keeping it illegal doesn't do any of those things either, plus it makes people involved in drugs violent as well, since they have cops hunting them.
Second, it makes addicts more approachable for regular medical help, if they need it. In the Netherlands, possession (for own use) and use of drugs are not illegal, only drug trade is. Heavy addicts can get free doses of methadon, a heroin substitute. There are lots of resocializing programs.
Sale of so-called "soft" drugs (i.e., weed), isn't officially legal but it's "tolerated". That's because they are really no problem, and selling them in their own stores keeps weed smokers away from the hard stuff. Legalizing it is impossible because of pressure from other countries.
In short, the Dutch policy is extremely pragmatic. Other countries are mostly legalistic. I believe that the drug problem in the Netherlands is much smaller than in other Western countries.
How many years would rehabilitate him, you believe? 2? 4? 10? life?
California, 1999 emission 362.8 million tons CO2 (link). Land area is 155,959 sq.m. (403,932 sq.km.). Population (2000) 33,8 M. (link).
Picking European country with similar population... Spain, 40.3 million people, 499.542 sq km (2004) 247.2 million tons CO2 (1998, link),
(3) Creationism. This is not a serious option anywhere in the Western world, but a large percentage of smart Americans still think that evolution is doubtful and that creationism is a real competitor.
As you say, the difference between the US and elsewhere is odd.