I know you're just being silly, but lest you think he's a mere interloper dabbling in somebody else's field, he also has an undergrad degree in CS. The guy is seriously amazing.
I actually know a guy who codes for fun, but he's not a full-time developer. He's a pediatrician specializing in assessing child abuse. He comes home from a long, frustrating day of looking at the aftermath of the scum of humanity and relaxes by writing image processing software that helps him in his work. Also, he has physical disabilities (cerebral palsy from oxygen deprivation at birth).
Exactly, like the Theory of Plate Tectonics. Or Big Bang Theory. Or Stellar Evolution. Or Evolution (the biological kind).
Plate movement is an event that we can observe and measure. It happens frequently.
All those other things are more properly hypotheses than theories.* Just like global warming, we can't test them in repeatable experiments. And this is not a distinction without a difference. F=ma is a theory. We've tested it for hundreds of years and found it to be a reliable predictor of results. (Until we started making things go really fast. Then we had to adjust it to account for relativity. Even very solid theories are subject to adjustment.) Using F=ma, we can predictably do really cool things, like land a rover on a planet millions of miles away, assuming we're all using the same units.
Hypotheses are explanations that we impose on events after the fact. We observe a phenomenon and try to work backward to come up with a chain of cause and effect. This is the exact opposite of experimentation. That doesn't mean it's not useful. It just means that we can't reliably use it to predict the future like we can do with a theory.
And if you have such distrust of computer models, then go live in a hippie commune somewhere. The rest of us like our modern technology, thank you very much - almost all of which relies, to greater or lesser extent, on computer models.
The thing about computer models is that they're only as good as their inputs, and they get less reliable as systems get more complex. Again, we can use computer models to very accurately predict that planets' orbits or the flight path of a rover to Mars. Even when we add well-understood phenomena like air resistance, we can very accurately model the performance of an airplane. But systems like the atmosphere or the stock markets have far too many disturbances to model accurately. At that point, it's really just educated guesses. That's why weather forecasts are really only reliable for a couple of days. That's why stock markets do unexpected things, despite our best models. And that's why we don't really know what the climate's going to do for the next hundred years.
Could I be wrong? Could James Hansen's fear mongering be 100% spot on? Could Al Gore's lucrative carbon credit trading system save us from certain annihalation? Sure. But there's no way to test it and see which one of us is right. That being the case, we are both left to make the best decisions we can based on the information available to us.
*With the qualification that we can test and observe evolution on a micro scale with viruses and bacteria.
How is "new and non-obvious" lax? New means nobody has ever done it before. Non-obvious means that a person having ordinary skill in the art would not be expected to think of it. That's a pretty definition for "invention."
While I agree with you personally, the ladies and gentlemen in the black robes do not. (Or more precisely, at least five of them have disagreed with us enough times.) I am often disturbed by the logical contortions those judges go through to justify institutional racism. (And it's not even "reverse racism." It's just racism.) How they think we can cure racism with more racism is a mystery to me.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The 14th Amendment was not part of the original Bill of Rights, which was only concerned with limiting the power of the federal government to infringe on people's rights. The states could do almost anything they wanted within the limits of their own state constitutions. The 13th (ending slavery), 14th (civil rights), and 15th (right to vote regardless of race) amendments were passed after the civil war, and the southern states were forced to ratify them as a condition of being re-admitted to the Union. Under the 14th Amendment, most of the Bill of Rights now applies to the individual states.
This law is almost certianly unconstitutional under the current 14th Amendment jurisprudence, but somebody would have to challenge it first. Since it's apparently not being enforced, it's not likely that anybody is going to bother with challenging it.
Actually, mixing unusual ingredients would be quite enough for a patent as long as it was new and non-obvious. It may be hard to find, because cooking has been around for a really long time. But if you can find a new recipe, you can get a patent on it. (Come to think of it, maybe I should have at least done a patentability search that one time I mixed some curry powder with vanilla ice cream. It was actually quite good if you got it in the right ratio.)
Troll? No. Misguided? Yeah. You may not agree with judges' rulings (I often don't). But I've never seen a U.S. federal judge who really gives a flip where your company's headquarters are. Federal judges are usually too aloof for that kind of favoritism. They're appointed for life, and it is literally unconstitutional to fire them or reduce their pay. They don't have to kowtow to anybody. They are more free to do whatever they think is right than anybody else in any other job.
An elected state court judge, on the other hand, who has to fight for his seat every couple of years---yeah, he's more vulnerable to "home team" bias. But he also doesn't have any jurisdiction over patent cases.
I disagree that the second paragraph is about trademark and publicity. It is soundly within U.S. copyright law, as it involves reproducing a copyrighted work. The only way it would involve publicity rights is if I also used your image along with the quote or something like that. Even using your name probably wouldn't be actionable as long as I was simply doing it to attribute a fair and accurate quote to you.
In your case, since you are dedicating your comments to the public domain, those uses might implicate moral rights in countries that recognize those. But under U.S. law, moral rights are a fuzzy concept at best. And I think that makes my point just as well. If the originator of the comment continues to feel enough proprietary interest in the comment to want to exercise control over how it's used, then that person has attached value to intellectual property, even if he or she isn't interested in monetizing it.
(Also, I wonder if you would feel the same way if your most marketable skill was the creation of artistic works that can be digitally copied. Perhaps you would. It's at least a question worth asking.)
So just to be clear, since you've released this comment "to the world," if I could hypothetically find a way to turn it into a very successful pamphlet, and I sold millions of copies, and then turned it into First Sale: The Motion Picture, which grosses $300 million at the box office, and I don't give you a single penny---you would be okay with that, because for you to be able to stop me from doing any of that would require you to "restrict my liberties"?
Are you an avid atheist? Would you be okay if I used quotes from your post to promote evangelical Christianity? (Or if you're a fundie, would you be okay if I used your post to promote atheism?) Are you pro-choice? Would you be okay if I used quotes from your post at a pro-life rally? (Or if you're pro-life, would you be okay if I used it at a pro-choice rally?) Are you a Linux zealot? Would you be okay with Microsoft using your post to promote its products?
Wow. Reading comprehension FAIL. Read your own link:
Although the NORC study was not primarily intended as a determination of which candidate "really won", analysis of the results, given the hand counting of machine-uncountable ballots due to various types of voter error, indicated that they would lead to differing results.
And later:
The results of the study showed that had the limited county by county recounts requested by the Gore team been completed, Bush would still have been the winner of the election. However, the study also showed that the result of a statewide recount of all disputed ballots could have been different.
The things we actually learn from Florida in 2000 are: (1) There was no clear winner; (2) Using the method Bush favored would probably lead to a Gore victory, while using the method Gore favored would probably lead to a Bush victory; and (3) Al Gore is a whiny crybaby who kept demanding the votes be recounted until he won.
Not that it matters now (this was about 10 years ago), but I don't think the caps were responsible for the exploding diodes. It had been up and running for a while, and the caps were already saturated. It was humming pretty loudly just before it blew if I remember correctly, so we put the transformer output on an o-scope. The waveform was just nuts, and it was hammering the diodes with a huge back-emf (it was a full-wave rectifier, so we weren't just clipping the negative voltage). But we actually got a pretty smooth DC out of our circuit until the diode blew. It settled down quite a bit after we got a new transformer.
The caps may have been responsible for the hum. I don't remember why we used such huge caps, except it seems like we were chasing a particular RC so we could get a smooth 600 V output. And I do recall it being awfully smooth. But every time we turned the thing off, my lab partner would play his guitar on it until it drained, or we would drain it through a grounded resistor, because none of us wanted to get near the thing until we were sure it was cold.
<memorylane> One of my lab partners in my EE Lab class played bass guitar. He wanted a tube pre-amp, but didn't want to spend $1,000 for it. So we built one as our lab project. We pulled a transformer out of an old Hammond organ, pulled tubes out of some old random stuff in a cabinet in the lab, threw in a pair of 12,000 uF caps, and four ceramic diodes for the rectifier. Then we had to code our own SPICE model for the tube so we could simulate it. That was one stout amp. Except the transformer put out a really unstable power waveformm, so one of our ceramic diodes exploded (tripping a breaker and taking out power in that wing), which was actually kind of cool. But we had to find a different transformer. Another time I accidentally grounded the 600-V node, which blew a big hole in our trace line and evaporated the solder off of one of our caps. The edges of the trace line survived, so we soldered the cap back in, powered it up, and it worked great. It was perfect except we were never able to get rid of the 60 Hz hum when it was plugged in. If you unplugged it, you could play for about a minute before the caps drained, and it sounded spectacular.</memorylane>
I miss those days. Now I just sit around writing patents and pleadings all day.
Yes, it could be a tort, but then you would need to prove actual damages to collect. You may also need to "prove" the PI wasn't actually ever interested in buying the house, which could be tricky.
I don't know anything about British tort law, but since American tort law is generally descended from it, I'm going to assume you only have to "prove" torts by a preponderance of the evidence. That basically means "more likely than not." If some guy is hired and paid to get pictures of your computers, shows up and says he's interested, looks around, takes pictures of your computers (which generally don't come with the house), hands those pictures over to his client, and doesn't make an offer on the house, what's more likely: (1) He was genuinely interested in the house and this was just coincidentally a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone; or (2) he was operating under a pretense for the sole purpose of getting pictures of the computers?
...except with goals that are in line with the most public good, curing disease for example...
And thus socialism always fails. As Justice Scalia sagely observed, "It is the first instinct of power to protect power."* The goal of your hypothetical socialized pharma industry would not be to cure disease. It would be to collect and broker power. It would be to make the rich richer under the auspices of protecting the poor. Some individuals are very good at being altruistic. Governments are not. The people who wrote our Constitution understood that and put in a bunch of roadblocks to prevent the federal government from getting too big and powerful. We have systematically dismantled those roadblocks---usually under the auspices of protecting the little guy---and thus managed to subjugate the little guy we pretend to protect.
*What, you want a cite? Okay. Here. Read this dissent if you've been wringing your hands about the recent opinion overturning campaign finance limits.
Slashdot Mirror
... on a person's head? I think not.
Steven Moffatt beat you to it: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (Perhaps it actually will be the Titanic from the Christmas special with Kylie Minogue.)
I know you're just being silly, but lest you think he's a mere interloper dabbling in somebody else's field, he also has an undergrad degree in CS. The guy is seriously amazing.
I actually know a guy who codes for fun, but he's not a full-time developer. He's a pediatrician specializing in assessing child abuse. He comes home from a long, frustrating day of looking at the aftermath of the scum of humanity and relaxes by writing image processing software that helps him in his work. Also, he has physical disabilities (cerebral palsy from oxygen deprivation at birth).
It's fine as long as you filter it. No need to kill off a whole program just because a few slackers couldn't keep their equipment maintained.
Exactly, like the Theory of Plate Tectonics. Or Big Bang Theory. Or Stellar Evolution. Or Evolution (the biological kind).
Plate movement is an event that we can observe and measure. It happens frequently.
All those other things are more properly hypotheses than theories.* Just like global warming, we can't test them in repeatable experiments. And this is not a distinction without a difference. F=ma is a theory. We've tested it for hundreds of years and found it to be a reliable predictor of results. (Until we started making things go really fast. Then we had to adjust it to account for relativity. Even very solid theories are subject to adjustment.) Using F=ma, we can predictably do really cool things, like land a rover on a planet millions of miles away, assuming we're all using the same units.
Hypotheses are explanations that we impose on events after the fact. We observe a phenomenon and try to work backward to come up with a chain of cause and effect. This is the exact opposite of experimentation. That doesn't mean it's not useful. It just means that we can't reliably use it to predict the future like we can do with a theory.
And if you have such distrust of computer models, then go live in a hippie commune somewhere. The rest of us like our modern technology, thank you very much - almost all of which relies, to greater or lesser extent, on computer models.
The thing about computer models is that they're only as good as their inputs, and they get less reliable as systems get more complex. Again, we can use computer models to very accurately predict that planets' orbits or the flight path of a rover to Mars. Even when we add well-understood phenomena like air resistance, we can very accurately model the performance of an airplane. But systems like the atmosphere or the stock markets have far too many disturbances to model accurately. At that point, it's really just educated guesses. That's why weather forecasts are really only reliable for a couple of days. That's why stock markets do unexpected things, despite our best models. And that's why we don't really know what the climate's going to do for the next hundred years.
Could I be wrong? Could James Hansen's fear mongering be 100% spot on? Could Al Gore's lucrative carbon credit trading system save us from certain annihalation? Sure. But there's no way to test it and see which one of us is right. That being the case, we are both left to make the best decisions we can based on the information available to us.
*With the qualification that we can test and observe evolution on a micro scale with viruses and bacteria.
Actually, this is a projection based on a computer model. A theory has a falsifiable premise that can be tested in a controlled experiment.
How is "new and non-obvious" lax? New means nobody has ever done it before. Non-obvious means that a person having ordinary skill in the art would not be expected to think of it. That's a pretty definition for "invention."
While I agree with you personally, the ladies and gentlemen in the black robes do not. (Or more precisely, at least five of them have disagreed with us enough times.) I am often disturbed by the logical contortions those judges go through to justify institutional racism. (And it's not even "reverse racism." It's just racism.) How they think we can cure racism with more racism is a mystery to me.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The 14th Amendment was not part of the original Bill of Rights, which was only concerned with limiting the power of the federal government to infringe on people's rights. The states could do almost anything they wanted within the limits of their own state constitutions. The 13th (ending slavery), 14th (civil rights), and 15th (right to vote regardless of race) amendments were passed after the civil war, and the southern states were forced to ratify them as a condition of being re-admitted to the Union. Under the 14th Amendment, most of the Bill of Rights now applies to the individual states.
This law is almost certianly unconstitutional under the current 14th Amendment jurisprudence, but somebody would have to challenge it first. Since it's apparently not being enforced, it's not likely that anybody is going to bother with challenging it.
Actually, mixing unusual ingredients would be quite enough for a patent as long as it was new and non-obvious. It may be hard to find, because cooking has been around for a really long time. But if you can find a new recipe, you can get a patent on it. (Come to think of it, maybe I should have at least done a patentability search that one time I mixed some curry powder with vanilla ice cream. It was actually quite good if you got it in the right ratio.)
Troll? No. Misguided? Yeah. You may not agree with judges' rulings (I often don't). But I've never seen a U.S. federal judge who really gives a flip where your company's headquarters are. Federal judges are usually too aloof for that kind of favoritism. They're appointed for life, and it is literally unconstitutional to fire them or reduce their pay. They don't have to kowtow to anybody. They are more free to do whatever they think is right than anybody else in any other job.
An elected state court judge, on the other hand, who has to fight for his seat every couple of years---yeah, he's more vulnerable to "home team" bias. But he also doesn't have any jurisdiction over patent cases.
You should give it a second look. They all wear scrubs and Crocs now.
I disagree that the second paragraph is about trademark and publicity. It is soundly within U.S. copyright law, as it involves reproducing a copyrighted work. The only way it would involve publicity rights is if I also used your image along with the quote or something like that. Even using your name probably wouldn't be actionable as long as I was simply doing it to attribute a fair and accurate quote to you.
In your case, since you are dedicating your comments to the public domain, those uses might implicate moral rights in countries that recognize those. But under U.S. law, moral rights are a fuzzy concept at best. And I think that makes my point just as well. If the originator of the comment continues to feel enough proprietary interest in the comment to want to exercise control over how it's used, then that person has attached value to intellectual property, even if he or she isn't interested in monetizing it.
(Also, I wonder if you would feel the same way if your most marketable skill was the creation of artistic works that can be digitally copied. Perhaps you would. It's at least a question worth asking.)
So just to be clear, since you've released this comment "to the world," if I could hypothetically find a way to turn it into a very successful pamphlet, and I sold millions of copies, and then turned it into First Sale: The Motion Picture, which grosses $300 million at the box office, and I don't give you a single penny---you would be okay with that, because for you to be able to stop me from doing any of that would require you to "restrict my liberties"?
Are you an avid atheist? Would you be okay if I used quotes from your post to promote evangelical Christianity? (Or if you're a fundie, would you be okay if I used your post to promote atheism?) Are you pro-choice? Would you be okay if I used quotes from your post at a pro-life rally? (Or if you're pro-life, would you be okay if I used it at a pro-choice rally?) Are you a Linux zealot? Would you be okay with Microsoft using your post to promote its products?
And later:
The things we actually learn from Florida in 2000 are: (1) There was no clear winner; (2) Using the method Bush favored would probably lead to a Gore victory, while using the method Gore favored would probably lead to a Bush victory; and (3) Al Gore is a whiny crybaby who kept demanding the votes be recounted until he won.
Also, his real name is Asok and he can grow a third arm when facing an impossible deadline.
Wish I had mod points. Honorary +1.
You destroyed a Hammond organ just for the transformer? Scary.
Well, we cannibalized an old, dead Hammond organ just for the (faulty) transformer. I don't think that's quite the same thing.
Not that it matters now (this was about 10 years ago), but I don't think the caps were responsible for the exploding diodes. It had been up and running for a while, and the caps were already saturated. It was humming pretty loudly just before it blew if I remember correctly, so we put the transformer output on an o-scope. The waveform was just nuts, and it was hammering the diodes with a huge back-emf (it was a full-wave rectifier, so we weren't just clipping the negative voltage). But we actually got a pretty smooth DC out of our circuit until the diode blew. It settled down quite a bit after we got a new transformer.
The caps may have been responsible for the hum. I don't remember why we used such huge caps, except it seems like we were chasing a particular RC so we could get a smooth 600 V output. And I do recall it being awfully smooth. But every time we turned the thing off, my lab partner would play his guitar on it until it drained, or we would drain it through a grounded resistor, because none of us wanted to get near the thing until we were sure it was cold.
<memorylane> One of my lab partners in my EE Lab class played bass guitar. He wanted a tube pre-amp, but didn't want to spend $1,000 for it. So we built one as our lab project. We pulled a transformer out of an old Hammond organ, pulled tubes out of some old random stuff in a cabinet in the lab, threw in a pair of 12,000 uF caps, and four ceramic diodes for the rectifier. Then we had to code our own SPICE model for the tube so we could simulate it. That was one stout amp. Except the transformer put out a really unstable power waveformm, so one of our ceramic diodes exploded (tripping a breaker and taking out power in that wing), which was actually kind of cool. But we had to find a different transformer. Another time I accidentally grounded the 600-V node, which blew a big hole in our trace line and evaporated the solder off of one of our caps. The edges of the trace line survived, so we soldered the cap back in, powered it up, and it worked great. It was perfect except we were never able to get rid of the 60 Hz hum when it was plugged in. If you unplugged it, you could play for about a minute before the caps drained, and it sounded spectacular.</memorylane>
I miss those days. Now I just sit around writing patents and pleadings all day.
Yes, it could be a tort, but then you would need to prove actual damages to collect. You may also need to "prove" the PI wasn't actually ever interested in buying the house, which could be tricky.
I don't know anything about British tort law, but since American tort law is generally descended from it, I'm going to assume you only have to "prove" torts by a preponderance of the evidence. That basically means "more likely than not." If some guy is hired and paid to get pictures of your computers, shows up and says he's interested, looks around, takes pictures of your computers (which generally don't come with the house), hands those pictures over to his client, and doesn't make an offer on the house, what's more likely: (1) He was genuinely interested in the house and this was just coincidentally a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone; or (2) he was operating under a pretense for the sole purpose of getting pictures of the computers?
Still the damages will be minimal.
37 posts about the Pentium division bug.
By my estimation, at least half of the Slashdot readership isn't even old enough to remember the Pentium division bug.
...except with goals that are in line with the most public good, curing disease for example...
And thus socialism always fails. As Justice Scalia sagely observed, "It is the first instinct of power to protect power."* The goal of your hypothetical socialized pharma industry would not be to cure disease. It would be to collect and broker power. It would be to make the rich richer under the auspices of protecting the poor. Some individuals are very good at being altruistic. Governments are not. The people who wrote our Constitution understood that and put in a bunch of roadblocks to prevent the federal government from getting too big and powerful. We have systematically dismantled those roadblocks---usually under the auspices of protecting the little guy---and thus managed to subjugate the little guy we pretend to protect.
*What, you want a cite? Okay. Here. Read this dissent if you've been wringing your hands about the recent opinion overturning campaign finance limits.
This post is a lie.