I think you'd be surprised to find a lot (perhaps even a majority) of people don't consider tax evasion theft
I came really close to just giving up on you here...
You can argue semantics, but it's only been recently that the dictionary has gone to such painstaking lengths to correct people on what theft really means
I call b***s***. Look me straight in the eye and tell me you've got several dictionaries spanning a significant period of time, and that you've compared the defintions of "theft" in all of them.
Even if you have done that, you've missed the point.
Dictionaries define words about as well as lawmakers define morality. If the dictionary authors have indeed "refined" the meaning of theft, it could very well be due to the prevailing atmosphere of distaste for the concept of intellectual property that now prevails in certain academic circles. Look me straight in the eye and tell me that such an author is any more ethical than a politician who takes money from Disney.
All of this arguing over the language is nothing more than a political battle. The theory goes like this: win the language, win the people.
First, nobody has ever proved that redefining a word can win a political battle. Whenever people try to do that in a really egregious way, there is no shortage of people who point it out. Second, when people discredit the concept of intellectual property, what they are really saying is "I want your intellectual property". Finally, whether property law is the basis for IP law or not is irrelevant.
Why? Well, we mentioned taxes, right? What makes you think that IP laws based in property law would be any less subject to taxation and/or condemnation for the public benefit, just as real estate, liquor, gasoline, cars and a host of other goods are.
Of course, I realize such a tax wouldn't look right on your Libertarian balance sheet; but that's the problem with Libertarianism to begin with. It reduces everything to a formula, and then tries to make the real world fit the formula. The world is not that simple.
Oh, and one other thing. To be consistant in your view, you should assert that theft of GPL'ed software isn't theft either, and you should be sure to correct anybody who says it's theft. You have been doing that, haven't you?
Show me how they will no longer be able to manufacture this motherboard if I made duplicates
Profit margin before duplication? Positive. Profit margin after clones enter the market? Negative. The company goes out of business.
No, it doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
However, A smart company realizes that even when protected by IP laws, IP is still perishable due to perfectly legal causes. They should plan for it.
Two examples of companies that failed to plan for the expected devaluation of IP and suffered: Xerox and Polaroid.
Now, I'm not arguing that Xerox should still have a patent. I'm just saying that companies that are playing by the rules shouldn't have their work stolen and be forced into a commodity market before their time. Remember, this is a two-way street. Eldred felt cheated because copyright was extended. This company feels cheated because copyright is being shortened.
Actually, it's a quirk in the language. Adjectives almost always come before nouns (AN). This is one of the few exceptions. In fact, NA is so rare in English (at least in the US it is) that just about everybody will forgive you if you treat NA phrases as "compound nouns".
The only other example I can think of is "court martial". "Will there be court martials for those pilots?" makes perfect sense even if "courts martial" is correct.
I mean, what are we? French?
IIRC, some official from the US Navy said a while ago that ships would no longer be "she" and would instead be "it" as most inanimate objects in English have no gender.
That suits me fine as well. Although gendered pronouns for inanimate objects lend a picturesque quality to speech as in "She's gonna blow!", I wouldn't want them to be as important to English as they are to the continental European languages. Calling your ship "she" is nice as an option, if you want to convey romance or quaintness; but the last thing I want is somebody correcting me for calling it an "it".
If you're a tech crackpot claiming something impossible like PM, then getting raided by the Feds is the ideal exit strategy.
If done properly, you can create a cult of dreamers and conspiracy theorists who will claim the Feds stole and suppressed your technology.
Be sure to study the laws carefully before choosing this course. Choose something likely to net you less than a year in prison. Get a good lawyer. Chances are this is your first offense, so you should get off easy. However, be mindful of the judge who might try to "make an example out of you". Be cool while your case is pending. You don't want to get "Mitnicked".
Then when you get out you do the circuit of late night talk radio, alternative newspapers, self-published newsletters, websites, books, and even college campus talks. Unless you're really famous you won't be rolling in dough from this; but you can survive and within certain circles there will be lots of people happy to give you free meals.
What are the odds that you could put together a crew of 130-150 non-smokers for every active submarine?
Pretty good. It's the Navy. Just order them not to smoke. Make it a disqualification, like bedwetting or overt homosexuality. If they can't quit, transfer them to a garbage ship. What's long is the odds that the Navy would ever institute such a policy. Give it time though. We seem to be stepping closer to tobacco prohibition every year.
This bit was related to me through a friend who had a relative who was in a sub during WWII.
"When they were submerged he used to keep two cigarettes lit at two different locations, and he liked it because they wouldn't burn very fast and he could just keep them lit by taking a drag at one location or the other. If they went totally out, then there was trouble."
Either this guy was the captain or a high ranking officer, because I don't imagine that they allowed everybody to do that.
The point being, is that the guy enjoyed smoking in a low-oxygen environment because he didn't have to smoke the whole thing within a given time frame like you usually do.
I don't know if this story is true or not. Part of me doesn't want to know. Not to knock the guys in subs now; but men were men back then. There was no A/C on those boats. Real men don't need A/C. Real men don't need oxygen. I mean... the myth of Jebediah Springfield has value too.
The big caveat on the mini-itx cards is that they only have analog video outputs. A lot of power gets wasted going digital->VGA->LCD/CRT. That's why you can do small form-factor desktop with it; but not battery operated portable. The mini-itx.com site keeps teasing us about LVDS or some other digital output that will drive LCDs directly, but it hasn't materialized yet.
Now, the guy in the article seems to have chosen an embedded card of some kind. That's a bad choice. He's probably paying extra for the integrated LCD controller, ruggedness, or some other stuff that he doesn't need; so he had to cut corners on processing power. For small, quiet servers and desktops that are either stationary or plug-to-plug portable, mini-itx is definitely the way to go.
eBay Strikes Me As Very Vulnerable... to a distributed auction service run through Kazaa or something. Probably the only thing that stops someone from totally killing eBay with distributed auctions is a silly patent; but even silly patents will run out within most of our lifetimes.
Of course, verifying who is who on a p2p network is a challenge, but picture this: The RIAA et. al. may force p2p networks to provide user identification.
Don't see that as a crisis--see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to kill PayPal.
Of course eBay has tremendous brand recognition, but what happens if somebody starts streaming price comparisons (from Amazon?) through a p2p? Commision-free auctions are just one click from there, if you'll pardon my pun. Then, the patent issue devolves into what it really is, which is just a brawl between corporate legal budgets. Amazon/p2p/hackers vs. eBay/Paypal sounds like a great main event after all the warmup fights we've seen.
Of course eBay has brand recognition. So did Studebaker and DuMont.
I'd better hurry up and patent my business method of taking online wagers based on the size of corporate legal's payroll. Oh... wait... a bunch of online brokers have prior art.
Isn't this what we've been fighting in the music area, that it's breaking copyright etc, but not stealing?
Yeah, and if I cheat on my taxes they can lock me up for "tax evasion"; but they d***ed well better not acuse me of stealing. That just wouldn't be fair.
I hereby move that the Open Source and Free Software movements be combined and reorganized as The Society for Pointless Debates Revolving Around Semantics and Nomenclature or SPDRASN. I think that SPDRASN should be pronounced "spud raisin" and that a spud raisin is a wrinkled potato, not a white grape. What do you think?
OK... I've clicked all around their site, and so far I don't see any prices. In fact... I've now navigated their entire site and it's all marketing fluff. It looks like another one of those dealies where they want you to communicate with sales. I automaticly bypass those when searching. Why? Because I'm not mass producing. The time cost of interacting with sales is a factor. Also, I'm inclined to boycott any company that does business like that, because the whole point of such a strategy is to get you "engaged" and "committed to working with us". It's a form of vendor lock-in.
Now, if they can offer custom work that competes with Wincomm's pre-packaged solutions, that's great. Why don't they put some case studies, with specs and costs, on their website?If I have anything to say to sales, it's "do that, and maybe I'll get back to you".
The price problem with these things is usually in the cards. I know because I've been doing a lot of research online, looking for SBCs (Single Board Computers) that I could wedge into something small enough to build my holy grail: a "white box" portable.
Why not get a laptop? Because I hate the ergonomics and the form factors on laptops, and I hate the proprietary battery tech.
The most affordable card I've been able to find is made by Wincomm. Google around for it, or just check out BWI. It's still pricey $350-$450 IIRC. You can even get a fanless Transmeta version for like $100 extra dollars if you're still into that.
All of these cards are expensive when compared to PCs of comparable performance. I have several theories as to why: 1. They cater to the industrial computing and/or embedded market. When you can get them in onesies and twosies (which isn't always the case) they are going to cost more because these companies usually deal on volume with large manufacturers. 2. In some cases they are "ruggedized" and you pay for that even if you don't really need it. 3. The market is just smaller, so they have to price higher to recoup R&D costs. 4. Hefty licensing fees from chip companies (sometimes you have to pay thousands of dollars just for the rights to a reference design using their chips).
So, until somebody mass-produces the mobile equivalent of a generic MoBo for mobile CPUs, you're going to pay a premium for small form factors. Also, you would have to have better mechanical standards for connectors and add-on cards. The barriers aren't technical, just structural (as in "business structure"). There is no strong incentive for the power players to do this--yet.
At some point in the future, somebody will break through all this garbage. When they do, we could see some really exciting and affordable portable clone technology. That's what I'm searching for, and waiting for before I buy new hardware. By then, these cards should be powerful enough for non-jerky video too. They're almost there, but not quite.
This is one of the big misconceptions in the AIP movement. Whether or not IP is "property" or "privelege" is irrelevant.
Real Estate is about as tangible as you can get, but if you don't pay the tax you may have to forfeit it.
Your car is certainly yours, but in some jurisdictions you pay a "personal property tax". Anything that is taxed is, in a sense, not fully yours.
In the most extreme example, it is possible for your government to order you into harm's way because risking your life is deemed to be of greater benefit to society than not risking it. Your very life is not totally yours.
Whether or not IP is formulated as a right that's taxed or a privelege that's granted is a pointless intellectual exercise.
[Intellectual Property] lumps together diverse laws--copyright law, patent law, trademark law and others--which really have little in common.'"
class IPLaw : public Law { /* overrides from Law */ int GovernsTangible(); int* ConstitutionalReferences(); int IsFederalOnly();
/* virtual functions of IP law */ virtual double TimeLimit(); virtual int RequiresRegistration(); /*...various other characteristics... */ };
class CopyrightLaw : public IPLaw { double TimeLimit(); int RequiresRegistration(); };
/* other subclasses of IPLaw */
/* Implementations left to the reader */
The point being, "Intellecual Property" is a superclass and the copyright, trademark, etc. are just subclasses. Certainly these laws all have more in common with eachother than they do with, oh, say... export regulations or farm policy.
This business of RMS refusing to recognize the relationship is right up there with "GNU/Linux" as one of the top 10 dead horses that he likes to beat. Others include "don't say piracy", "free as in freedom" etc.
Now, if RMS wants to invalidate the concept of IP, he's perfectly welcome to do that, but for cryin' out loud RMS, don't you have anything better than a mantra of logical fallacies and slogans with which to back up your arguments?
Well, you could play off the semantics of "flat" and say that their patent only applies to objects that fit within the 2-d plane. However, the judge might not buy that. Instead, they may choose the more common definition of "flat" which is that the object has a surface that appears flat to the naked eye, or can be verified flat within some industry standard number of angstroms.
The more obvious workaround?
Mill all your wafers into N-sided objects.
If N is sufficiently large, you don't lose much viable surface and you void the patent. I say, choose 69-agons. You know. To screw their patent.
The article should read "Top 500 Supercomputes that we know about Ranked".
Wouldn't you love to know what the NSA uses to crack 128-bit keys? Ever wonder if the solution to RSA-1024 is just laying around in their files somewhere, the employees who know about it sworn to secrecy?
...how Linux distros divvy up their dollars, and what percentage the programmers get.
...how work-for-hire proprietary software houses divvy up the dollars, and what percentage their programmers get.
It's gotta be far less than a penny on the dollar for Linux, and I'd be surprised if it was more than a nickel on the dollar for all but the smallest proprietary software houses (where the coders are probably the owners anyway).
So, if artists can make 12% of the gross online, that's sweet compared to a lot of other situations.
Well duuuuh, but in order for them to get those "clicks" I have to have at least some hope of getting something useful in return. For example, The Drudge Report carries stuff that, for the most part, doesn't interest me.
If they wanted to attract me, they'd have to start posting stuff that interests me and that I find imformative. If Slashdot totally loses its ability to provide me with anything worth reading, I will, eventually, stop reading it.
So I don't see how you can invalidate my complaint just because/. is maximizing clicks as opposed to maximizing information. The two don't have a precise 1:1 correlation, but they do have some correlation.
Besides, it was the University of Birmingham that failed to provide useful information. My criticism was directed at them, not Slashdot.
The article about the micro engine was frustrating. "300 times more eneergy". Bah! 300 times more energy than a watch battery or a car battery? Obviously, they mean power but how much power? 300 times x? What's x?
Also, since this thing consumes fuel, it might be helpful to compare power-to-weight ratios with the smallest gas engines widely available (e.g., model airplane engines).
Thanks a lot, U Birmingham, for dumbing the article so far down that all it conveys is "oooohhh look, neat new thing".
Slashdot Mirror
What about their maids and butlers?
Now... where to get zero-G cooking and cleaning experience?
I made you post so much crap that Slashdot put forth the infamous "read the rest of this comment" link.
I win.
I think you'd be surprised to find a lot (perhaps even a majority) of people don't consider tax evasion theft
I came really close to just giving up on you here...
You can argue semantics, but it's only been recently that the dictionary has gone to such painstaking lengths to correct people on what theft really means
I call b***s***. Look me straight in the eye and tell me you've got several dictionaries spanning a significant period of time, and that you've compared the defintions of "theft" in all of them.
Even if you have done that, you've missed the point.
Dictionaries define words about as well as lawmakers define morality. If the dictionary authors have indeed "refined" the meaning of theft, it could very well be due to the prevailing atmosphere of distaste for the concept of intellectual property that now prevails in certain academic circles. Look me straight in the eye and tell me that such an author is any more ethical than a politician who takes money from Disney.
All of this arguing over the language is nothing more than a political battle. The theory goes like this: win the language, win the people.
First, nobody has ever proved that redefining a word can win a political battle. Whenever people try to do that in a really egregious way, there is no shortage of people who point it out. Second, when people discredit the concept of intellectual property, what they are really saying is "I want your intellectual property". Finally, whether property law is the basis for IP law or not is irrelevant.
Why? Well, we mentioned taxes, right? What makes you think that IP laws based in property law would be any less subject to taxation and/or condemnation for the public benefit, just as real estate, liquor, gasoline, cars and a host of other goods are.
Of course, I realize such a tax wouldn't look right on your Libertarian balance sheet; but that's the problem with Libertarianism to begin with. It reduces everything to a formula, and then tries to make the real world fit the formula. The world is not that simple.
Oh, and one other thing. To be consistant in your view, you should assert that theft of GPL'ed software isn't theft either, and you should be sure to correct anybody who says it's theft. You have been doing that, haven't you?
Enough said.
Show me how they will no longer be able to manufacture this motherboard if I made duplicates
Profit margin before duplication? Positive. Profit margin after clones enter the market? Negative. The company goes out of business.
No, it doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
However, A smart company realizes that even when protected by IP laws, IP is still perishable due to perfectly legal causes. They should plan for it.
Two examples of companies that failed to plan for the expected devaluation of IP and suffered: Xerox and Polaroid.
Now, I'm not arguing that Xerox should still have a patent. I'm just saying that companies that are playing by the rules shouldn't have their work stolen and be forced into a commodity market before their time. Remember, this is a two-way street. Eldred felt cheated because copyright was extended. This company feels cheated because copyright is being shortened.
Besides, you are just whipping an old dead horse here. See my previous post on this matter
Elvis. A man ahead of his time.
(OK, he shot the lousy box, but it's the same idea)
...when an open invitation for irony comes along, most of us are at a loss.
Actually, it's a quirk in the language. Adjectives almost always come before nouns (AN). This is one of the few exceptions. In fact, NA is so rare in English (at least in the US it is) that just about everybody will forgive you if you treat NA phrases as "compound nouns".
The only other example I can think of is "court martial". "Will there be court martials for those pilots?" makes perfect sense even if "courts martial" is correct.
I mean, what are we? French?
IIRC, some official from the US Navy said a while ago that ships would no longer be "she" and would instead be "it" as most inanimate objects in English have no gender.
That suits me fine as well. Although gendered pronouns for inanimate objects lend a picturesque quality to speech as in "She's gonna blow!", I wouldn't want them to be as important to English as they are to the continental European languages. Calling your ship "she" is nice as an option, if you want to convey romance or quaintness; but the last thing I want is somebody correcting me for calling it an "it".
If you're a tech crackpot claiming something impossible like PM, then getting raided by the Feds is the ideal exit strategy.
If done properly, you can create a cult of dreamers and conspiracy theorists who will claim the Feds stole and suppressed your technology.
Be sure to study the laws carefully before choosing this course. Choose something likely to net you less than a year in prison. Get a good lawyer. Chances are this is your first offense, so you should get off easy. However, be mindful of the judge who might try to "make an example out of you". Be cool while your case is pending. You don't want to get "Mitnicked".
Then when you get out you do the circuit of late night talk radio, alternative newspapers, self-published newsletters, websites, books, and even college campus talks. Unless you're really famous you won't be rolling in dough from this; but you can survive and within certain circles there will be lots of people happy to give you free meals.
internet enabled bullets
Sorry. You can't kill. The network is down.
What are the odds that you could put together a crew of 130-150 non-smokers for every active submarine?
Pretty good. It's the Navy. Just order them not to smoke. Make it a disqualification, like bedwetting or overt homosexuality. If they can't quit, transfer them to a garbage ship. What's long is the odds that the Navy would ever institute such a policy. Give it time though. We seem to be stepping closer to tobacco prohibition every year.
what are they doing smoking in a sub
This bit was related to me through a friend who had a relative who was in a sub during WWII.
"When they were submerged he used to keep two cigarettes lit at two different locations, and he liked it because they wouldn't burn very fast and he could just keep them lit by taking a drag at one location or the other. If they went totally out, then there was trouble."
Either this guy was the captain or a high ranking officer, because I don't imagine that they allowed everybody to do that.
The point being, is that the guy enjoyed smoking in a low-oxygen environment because he didn't have to smoke the whole thing within a given time frame like you usually do.
I don't know if this story is true or not. Part of me doesn't want to know. Not to knock the guys in subs now; but men were men back then. There was no A/C on those boats. Real men don't need A/C. Real men don't need oxygen. I mean... the myth of Jebediah Springfield has value too.
The big caveat on the mini-itx cards is that they only have analog video outputs. A lot of power gets wasted going digital->VGA->LCD/CRT. That's why you can do small form-factor desktop with it; but not battery operated portable. The mini-itx.com site keeps teasing us about LVDS or some other digital output that will drive LCDs directly, but it hasn't materialized yet.
Now, the guy in the article seems to have chosen an embedded card of some kind. That's a bad choice. He's probably paying extra for the integrated LCD controller, ruggedness, or some other stuff that he doesn't need; so he had to cut corners on processing power. For small, quiet servers and desktops that are either stationary or plug-to-plug portable, mini-itx is definitely the way to go.
eBay Strikes Me As Very Vulnerable... to a distributed auction service run through Kazaa or something. Probably the only thing that stops someone from totally killing eBay with distributed auctions is a silly patent; but even silly patents will run out within most of our lifetimes.
Of course, verifying who is who on a p2p network is a challenge, but picture this: The RIAA et. al. may force p2p networks to provide user identification.
Don't see that as a crisis--see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to kill PayPal.
Of course eBay has tremendous brand recognition, but what happens if somebody starts streaming price comparisons (from Amazon?) through a p2p? Commision-free auctions are just one click from there, if you'll pardon my pun. Then, the patent issue devolves into what it really is, which is just a brawl between corporate legal budgets. Amazon/p2p/hackers vs. eBay/Paypal sounds like a great main event after all the warmup fights we've seen.
Of course eBay has brand recognition. So did Studebaker and DuMont.
I'd better hurry up and patent my business method of taking online wagers based on the size of corporate legal's payroll. Oh... wait... a bunch of online brokers have prior art.
Isn't this what we've been fighting in the music area, that it's breaking copyright etc, but not stealing?
Yeah, and if I cheat on my taxes they can lock me up for "tax evasion"; but they d***ed well better not acuse me of stealing. That just wouldn't be fair.
I hereby move that the Open Source and Free Software movements be combined and reorganized as The Society for Pointless Debates Revolving Around Semantics and Nomenclature or SPDRASN. I think that SPDRASN should be pronounced "spud raisin" and that a spud raisin is a wrinkled potato, not a white grape. What do you think?
OK... I've clicked all around their site, and so far I don't see any prices. In fact... I've now navigated their entire site and it's all marketing fluff. It looks like another one of those dealies where they want you to communicate with sales. I automaticly bypass those when searching. Why? Because I'm not mass producing. The time cost of interacting with sales is a factor. Also, I'm inclined to boycott any company that does business like that, because the whole point of such a strategy is to get you "engaged" and "committed to working with us". It's a form of vendor lock-in.
Now, if they can offer custom work that competes with Wincomm's pre-packaged solutions, that's great. Why don't they put some case studies, with specs and costs, on their website?If I have anything to say to sales, it's "do that, and maybe I'll get back to you".
The price problem with these things is usually in the cards. I know because I've been doing a lot of research online, looking for SBCs (Single Board Computers) that I could wedge into something small enough to build my holy grail: a "white box" portable.
Why not get a laptop? Because I hate the ergonomics and the form factors on laptops, and I hate the proprietary battery tech.
The most affordable card I've been able to find is made by Wincomm. Google around for it, or just check out BWI. It's still pricey $350-$450 IIRC. You can even get a fanless Transmeta version for like $100 extra dollars if you're still into that.
All of these cards are expensive when compared to PCs of comparable performance. I have several theories as to why: 1. They cater to the industrial computing and/or embedded market. When you can get them in onesies and twosies (which isn't always the case) they are going to cost more because these companies usually deal on volume with large manufacturers. 2. In some cases they are "ruggedized" and you pay for that even if you don't really need it. 3. The market is just smaller, so they have to price higher to recoup R&D costs. 4. Hefty licensing fees from chip companies (sometimes you have to pay thousands of dollars just for the rights to a reference design using their chips).
So, until somebody mass-produces the mobile equivalent of a generic MoBo for mobile CPUs, you're going to pay a premium for small form factors. Also, you would have to have better mechanical standards for connectors and add-on cards. The barriers aren't technical, just structural (as in "business structure"). There is no strong incentive for the power players to do this--yet.
At some point in the future, somebody will break through all this garbage. When they do, we could see some really exciting and affordable portable clone technology. That's what I'm searching for, and waiting for before I buy new hardware. By then, these cards should be powerful enough for non-jerky video too. They're almost there, but not quite.
This is one of the big misconceptions in the AIP movement. Whether or not IP is "property" or "privelege" is irrelevant.
Real Estate is about as tangible as you can get, but if you don't pay the tax you may have to forfeit it.
Your car is certainly yours, but in some jurisdictions you pay a "personal property tax". Anything that is taxed is, in a sense, not fully yours.
In the most extreme example, it is possible for your government to order you into harm's way because risking your life is deemed to be of greater benefit to society than not risking it. Your very life is not totally yours.
Whether or not IP is formulated as a right that's taxed or a privelege that's granted is a pointless intellectual exercise.
My ideas are right. Your ideas are wrong. I am important.
[Intellectual Property] lumps together diverse laws--copyright law, patent law, trademark law and others--which really have little in common.'"
The point being, "Intellecual Property" is a superclass and the copyright, trademark, etc. are just subclasses. Certainly these laws all have more in common with eachother than they do with, oh, say... export regulations or farm policy.
This business of RMS refusing to recognize the relationship is right up there with "GNU/Linux" as one of the top 10 dead horses that he likes to beat. Others include "don't say piracy", "free as in freedom" etc.
Now, if RMS wants to invalidate the concept of IP, he's perfectly welcome to do that, but for cryin' out loud RMS, don't you have anything better than a mantra of logical fallacies and slogans with which to back up your arguments?
a flat, cylindrical object
Well, you could play off the semantics of "flat" and say that their patent only applies to objects that fit within the 2-d plane. However, the judge might not buy that. Instead, they may choose the more common definition of "flat" which is that the object has a surface that appears flat to the naked eye, or can be verified flat within some industry standard number of angstroms.
The more obvious workaround?
Mill all your wafers into N-sided objects.
If N is sufficiently large, you don't lose much viable surface and you void the patent. I say, choose 69-agons. You know. To screw their patent.
The article should read "Top 500 Supercomputes that we know about Ranked".
Wouldn't you love to know what the NSA uses to crack 128-bit keys? Ever wonder if the solution to RSA-1024 is just laying around in their files somewhere, the employees who know about it sworn to secrecy?
Why don't you show us...
...how Linux distros divvy up their dollars, and what percentage the programmers get.
...how work-for-hire proprietary software houses divvy up the dollars, and what percentage their programmers get.
It's gotta be far less than a penny on the dollar for Linux, and I'd be surprised if it was more than a nickel on the dollar for all but the smallest proprietary software houses (where the coders are probably the owners anyway).
So, if artists can make 12% of the gross online, that's sweet compared to a lot of other situations.
Well duuuuh, but in order for them to get those "clicks" I have to have at least some hope of getting something useful in return. For example, The Drudge Report carries stuff that, for the most part, doesn't interest me.
If they wanted to attract me, they'd have to start posting stuff that interests me and that I find imformative. If Slashdot totally loses its ability to provide me with anything worth reading, I will, eventually, stop reading it.
So I don't see how you can invalidate my complaint just because /. is maximizing clicks as opposed to maximizing information. The two don't have a precise 1:1 correlation, but they do have some correlation.
Besides, it was the University of Birmingham that failed to provide useful information. My criticism was directed at them, not Slashdot.
The article about the micro engine was frustrating. "300 times more eneergy". Bah! 300 times more energy than a watch battery or a car battery? Obviously, they mean power but how much power? 300 times x? What's x?
Also, since this thing consumes fuel, it might be helpful to compare power-to-weight ratios with the smallest gas engines widely available (e.g., model airplane engines).
Thanks a lot, U Birmingham, for dumbing the article so far down that all it conveys is "oooohhh look, neat new thing".