Obviously they're not a very good or big company otherwise they wouldn't be sueing, and even more so I'm sure prior art on this can be found...
From the press release...
Magnequench, with headquarters in Anderson, Indiana, has annual revenues of more than $250 million. It has more than 1,500 employees in seven countries and nine production facilities. In addition to Indiana, the company has operations in North Carolina, New Jersey, Germany, Switzerland, England, Singapore, Japan and the People's Republic of China
...which would suggest they're both big and good.
They're a spun-off joint venture between General Motors, Sumitomo Special Metals and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.
What I found interesting was that their attorney is one Archibald Cox. Now if that's the Watergate Special Prosecutor, then they're not exactly skimping on the legal firepower, are they?
Based on the same broad ignorance as every other poster to this story, I'd say this looks like a pretty credible legal attack, as long as the patent's there. And since it's not on Magnets, but the use of certain Neodymium compounds to make high-powered magnets, it might well be.
As a US company, if you try and sell a product into the UK and it doesn't meet their safety requirements or whatever, it will be deemed illegal, despite the fact it may be legal under US law
This used to be the case. We now live in the insane world of the WTO Treaty, under which everything is subsumed to Free Trade. And that certainly *does* include health and safety.
So now, in the example posited, what is 'meant' to hapen is that the company attempting to sell the 450V 63A 3-phase teddybears into the UK, when it's stymied by the UK's Trading Standards laws, goes to the relevant international court, sues the UK government for restraint of trade, and the UK has to (a) pay huge punitive damages, and (b) remove the offending legislation.
In short, under WTO rules, sovereignty is something which applies to Companies and not to Countries. And therefore it is no business of any government to make any laws which could offend any company anywhere in the world, no matter how repulsive its business practices.
Now, I am NOT suggesting that this is a good thing. But it IS international law as it currently stands. And that's why the demonstrations in Seattle, Prague, Quebec and so on are not necessarily 100% bad.
Physically interrupting network connections to various countries....
The EU would attempt to block traffic to and from a certain set of IP addresss....
Much simpler than that, actually. In the great Tony Blair tradition, here'sthe Third Way:
The European party to the data exchange gets charged, tried and convicted, has to pay a gargantuan amount in fines and punitive damages, loses it's credit rating dueto the judgements against it, and potentially its directors spend a bit of time behind bars.
Governments can't run health care, the mail, or...
The UK one does a pretty good job of both. OK, it's not perfect, but what is? You'll get the operation eventually. Your first class letter will almost certainly arrive at its destination for 9am the next day.
And if there's a popular will for the government to do something, even if it seems unlikely to succeed then that government ought to make a sincere effort. Democracy, it's called.
The right to Privacy is enshrined in the European Declaration on Human Rights. It's a bit like the US Constitution insofar as it provides a set of principles which national laws within the EU can't breach. And rather a good thing, too.
Interesting. I wonder what they'll do when a corporation that has a precense both in EU and another country (For example, USA) has data on a citizen. Forbid the corporation to have the data? forbid the corp to share it with itself outside the country?
We're one such company. Our UK presence has data-sharing agreements with a sister company in the US (they do our web-hosting, amongst other things, so need some subscriber-related data).
I'm not sure of the details, but basically we had to draw up a data-handling contract between the UK and US companies, defining very specifically how transfers of personal data would be dealt with, and protected in the US. This then went to the Data Protection Registrar for approval, and once approved we could just get on with it.
The regualtions don't prevent all EU-outside transfers of personal data, they simply state that if the 'default' protection in the other territory isn't up to scratch, further binding conditions must be applied before data is transferred.
It was Hooke, his long-standing rival for the succession at the Royal Society.
The issue was the idea that white light was made up of colours, as expounded in Hooke's "micrographia". The Giants, if there were any, were the likes of Descartes. Hooke was described as being 'of low and crooked stature'
And Newton was a remarkably unpleasant chap by any standards. Although being a closet heretic probably didn't help his attitudes in a world where he could have easily got burned at the stake for a slip of the tongue. Had plenty of nasty digs at Leibniz over the calculus, too, but this one was aimed at Hooke.
"If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants".
Linus never ceases to amaze.
Perfect quote from Isaac Newton to counter all that Microsoft has been saying.
Great reply
Except...
This quote is often used to illustrate the humility of Newton. In these cases, it's a misquote.
Newton claimed to have discovered that white light was made up of mixed colours. Robert Hooke claimed that Newton had stolen the idea from his own Micrographia. Hooke is generally described as 'crooked and low of stature' and Newton and Hooke were long-standing rivals for primacy at The Royal Society (we're talking big money prizes here). The quote is from Newton's rebuttal of this accusation.
So basically the standard Newton quote was a typically nasty, snide put-down to Hooke, saying "even if I did steal these ideas, I certainly didn't steal them from a dwarf like you"
Maybe Linus is saying if he wants commercial ideas he'd rather get them from Bell Labs than from M$?
The man was a genius, certainly. But an angel he was not.
Newton was also an alchemist, who learned his stuff from one Thomas Vaughan (alias 'Eugenius Philalethes')
(I'm thinking of Crammond, the Oliver twins, Braben and Bell, etc etc.) ...
two undergraduates could introduce a totally new genre into gaming with one game (Elite)
this put me in mind of a friend who's currently doing something that could provide good portfolio (she doesn't need it, it was actually a bit of fun and a chanceto play with WML)...
I'm thinking of WAP Elite. What she's done is re-created the Elite environment in client-server multi-player guise, for WAP phones and emulators. A potential employer could see the site, check the gameplay, because Elite is such a classic, they would rapidly find that she's implemented all the canonical stuff with near-total accuracy, whilst still introducing new stuff (the multiplayer aspect, implementing it in coldFusion and WML etc). They could also see that she's got 300+ players by word of mouth while the game's still in Beta, and plenty of traffic at alt.fan.elite
Now that would get me interested. As would a long list of Quake mods she's done.
Er, now I can see how MS might have some rights to know who's bought machines WITH OEM windows on them
But if I, as an individual or as a company, choose to buy PCs with no MS products on them (and since the MS Apps only run on the MS OS's, buying a non-windows pc means it's MS-free), then what on earth would give them any rights whatsoever to information about my activities?
If they want to find this info, they can ask their good friends at Intel how many x86 chips they've shipped and then compare that with the sales figures for Windows. That would be intrusive maybe, but ethically reasonable.
But to ask the suppliers for information about someone else's customers is just preposterous. And probably contrary to Data Protection laws in those countries which have them
What the hell is "information wants to be free" supposed to mean, anyway?
It's a partial quote from a paper by Stewart Brand of MIT Media Lab, presented at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Restated in Brand's 'The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT', ISBN 0140097015, published by Viking Penguin in 1987.
The full quote runs:
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
I can't think of the last time anyone posted to/. that Information wants to be expensive.
A more accurate rendition might therefore be "I want information to be free"
And if that's flamebait, then mod Stewart Brand down, not me.
This topic just came up on a Sigue Sigue Sputnik list I read.
Years ago, sSs were on EMI. EMI own the rights, quite legitimately, to the material they recorded at the time, and publishing rights too.
But the band were dropped years ago, recently reformed, created thir own label and released an new CD, PirateSpace. Tony James, the 'BosSs' of Sputnik, made it abundantly clearthat the reason they reformed was the unexpected presence of many websites devoted to the band, and has repeatedly credited Napster with rekindling their career.
So, if filenames are to be banned based on a band name, here's another fatal flaw. EMI have every right to ban Napstered copies of "Love Missile F1-11". But they have no rights whatsoever over "Welcome to the 21st Century". And yet, if the filters are looking for the string "Sigue Sigue Sputnik"... Well, they deserve to be sued by Sputnikworld records for restraint of trade, since Napster is a preferred means of promotion by the new label.
I'm not sure what the GD's opinion of file sharing would be, but using them as an endorsement simply because of their taping policy is not sound.
Here's the dead's policy. It's pretty straightforward
But also a special case because it's embedded in 30 years of taper culture. Even before they put out the statement we all knew what the policy would be. A lot of us flatly refuse to buy boots of the Dead. And those who do usually make a point of then redistributing the material as widely as possible to demolish the bootleggers' markets.
Message from Grateful Dead Productions// Ice Nine
STATEMENT TO MP3 SITE OPERATORS
The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely non-commercial exchange of music taped at our concerts and those of our individual members. That a new medium of distribution has arisen - digital audio files being traded over the Internet - does not change our policy in this regard.
Our stipulations regarding digital distribution are merely extensions of those long-standing principles and they are as follows:
No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means.
All participants in such digital exchange acknowledge and respect the copyrights of the performers, writers and publishers of the music.
This notice should be clearly posted on all sites engaged in this activity.
We reserve the ability to withdraw our sanction of non-commercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work.
(note that I had to remove some "====" spacers from the quote because the lameness filter didn't like them. They appeared to the left and right of the heading, plus a full-width row at the bottom of the quote)
That is fine if you are not a serious artist. If you don't want to make money...
Is it just me, or is this a strong candidate for Non Sequitur Of The Month?
Was Vincent van Gogh a serious artist? Dmitri Shostakovich? Did Solzhenitsyn suddenly become a serious artist on the day he defected, after years of churning out worthless tat?
Sure, lots of highly respected artists have made plenty of money from their art, and I don't for one minute denigrate their success, but plenty more have failed to sell a single work and died penniless.
I'd guess that you come froma culture where money is considered not only the paramount, but actually the only virtue. Such a shame, life can be so much richer if you broaden your horizons a little.
Because, if you mean your guys are writing a program in assembler for serving web-pages, they deserve to be shot. There is no conceiveable reason to use assembly for anything by low-level operating system and embedded code.
Sorry, i wasn't as clear as I could have been. The webservers themselves are good old apache. It's the search engine that does controlled-vocabulary and free-text searching across 20 years of backfiles from 1500 journals that's built in assembly language. And for that task, we've been trying to find an alternative in a higher level language for several years now as, not to put too fine a point on it, the assembly guys are becoming an endangered species and we're in BIG trouble when they're gone. So far, nothing looks like coming anywhere close in terms of performance.
Or maybe I should tell you shareholders all about asm v. C, and how your squandering their investment.
I agree entirely that if we were starting from scratch, we'd not be using assembler. But what we have is a legacy system, so we have to balance the costs of incremental development in assembly against the costs of a total redevelopment.
As it happens we're investigating a redevelopment in Java on Websphere at the moment, and it's looking reasonably credible.
As I understand it, most scientific papers are submitted electronically in printable form (Tex, or formatted word processor documents), and scientific journals do not need a lot of fancy formatting.
This looks a little biit like the 'html as formatting instructions' fallacy that's damaged the web so badly.
The SGML isn't a question of formatting, particularly not for the dead-tree editions. It's done for the semantics to allow for searchability within our 'electronic warehouse' (those s/370s), as well as to permit stylesheeet-driven formatting for the variety of formats in which the material is made available.
Also bear in mind that there has to be a single file format for all the articles within an issue - by using SGML for this we can give the academics the freedom to use the document preparation tools of their choice. It's not so long ago that publishers had to mandate specific software for their authors, which was obviously not a good approach.
Well, there's always two sides to each story, of course.
I work for one of the publishers who refused to be interviewed. One crucial point that was missed was the matter of editorial quality control and peer review. One of the factors that gives aparticular journal its credibility is the mechanism to filter submissions, the moderaton if you like.
When we get a new article, the editor (usually one of an editorial board) takes a look at it and if it's reasonably credible, it goes out for review to several eminent practitioners for peer review, and only after this does it stand any chance of getting published.
We pay the editors. We pay the peer reviewers. We provide them with the necessary equipment (PC's, software, connectivity and so forth) to do the job. We also, later in the process, pay for the SGML markup, proofing, printing, distribution, administration of the subscriptions, protecting the authors' copyright when necessary. Then there's the webservers (in our case a cluster of s/370's with a large team writing assembler for them - we get a LOT of hits requesting very large responses - fulltext with a lot of illustrations) when the electronic versions are released, of course.
This stuff is far from cheap. And it's also worth remembering( this is a legalistic point, not a moral one as I tend to disagree with it on moral grounds somewhat) - we're a listed company, and like it or not we are legally obliged to maximise revenue for our shareholders, so if we were to make an arbitrary decision to free up material with over 49 years of copyright outstanding, it would be only right that our directors would go straight to jail.
But it's mainly the peer review that costs. If you want quality peer reviewers, you'll find they're very busy and in short supply.
TomV
Re:What is "Bill S.1618 TITLE III" ?
on
Buried in email?
·
· Score: 2
If you really want to complain, you could try mailing abuse@ their ISP: it works, sometimes
Yup. I *always* go upstream on them. Seems to be a lot more effective.
Another thing to note. Not everyone checks the 'abuse@' address.
So send to 'sales@' as well. You can be absolutely darn tootin' certain someone's checking that one.
Oddly I learned this one in meatspace, on the phone. *Never* bother with the customer service hotline. It's understaffed and underfunded. Call the sales line and you'll find they're very eager to get you off the line so they can make some money. They can be remarkably helpful.
Hopefully reasonably on-topic, but I beg your indulgence while I take the opportunity to shamelessly plug a nice port of a classic game to a new platform
Currently in Beta, and the more testers the merrier, it's...
Elite for WAP phones. Currently featuring the original Galaxy 1, full trading model, most of the combat, more graphics on the way.
If you don't have a WAP phone, it's playable thru emulators (I prefer the M3Gate one), links available from the site.
Full kudos to Modesty and Dan Catt for all the work.
If our civilization comes to an end,
why are the people that come after us
going to care about 90% of the stuff
we know or do? They might be more
interested in where to find food and
shelter.
Shortsighted. After the Roman empire fell, we spent a good 1000 years concentrating on food and shelter (whilst, it might be added, the Islamic world took the science and philosophy of the Graeco-Roman civilisation and developed them massively).
But after a while, mopre specifically after the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent dispersal of the old knowledge (with its Islamic enhancements, such as arabic numerals, the Zero concept and so forth), the west's intellectual curiosity was rekindled, and at that point, the surviving documents, or transcripts thereof, became hugely valuable.
So based on that example, any archival medium, for the very reasons you mentioned needs to be robust enough to last a good half-millennium. Preferably in a form where the technology needed to read it is minimal, so that it can help with the re-booting of civilisation. So if we leave data in binary form, we also need human-readable instructions for reading it.
he could whistle tones and
didn't need any boxes to phreak. I hear he
was based on a real person...
Joe Engressia from Tennessee. Blind and pitch-perfect. Started phreaking aged 8. didn't need a Cap'n Crunch whitle to get his 2600. Becaume a bit of a cause celebre around 1971. Calls himself Joybubbles now.
I understand your government-run healthcare system sucks as bad as your government-run telecom system. Is this true?
Thanks for your sincere concern, but actually, our government-run healthcare system works a whole lot better than our privately-run £1000/second-profitable telecom system. And a darned sight better than the privately-owned recurring lethal diaster that is all that's left of the railway we built with our taxes.
...and they do actual serious destruction to competitors robots, which stifles innovation (why would i want to invest a great deal of money/time into a robot if their much-too-favored 'house robot' snips and blowtorches and spikes the hell out of it?)
Methinks you've rather missed the point here. If you and I were Mallory and Irvine contemplating an ascent of Everest, would you say "why would I want to invest a huge amount of money and time if the odds are we'll just freeze to death half way up?"
Behind the shiny brash facade, there's a terribly old-fashioned attitude behind Robot Wars, a blend of the boffin mentality and the corinthian ideal that it's the taking part which counts, and the win is just a bonus. I've seen players laughing their hearts out as their robots get mangled. I've also seen competitors' robots junking the House Robots. Which is always joyous. There have been robots which have won their bout within half a minute and then gone after the house robots just to please the crowd.
Believe me, the house robots are a good thing - they guarantee an entertaining bout even if one competitor robot is a total walkover.
No wedges. At least, I didn't see any. Yes, it seems that the wedge shape is the path evolution is directing "robots" down in battlebots, based on the particular set of rules chosen for the game
It's the evolution that keeps me watching. Oh, and the mindless destruction of course.
A classic case in point was a robot that first appeared a year or so ago called HypnoDisc. Up til that point there had been a clear tendency towards wedge-shaped robots with some sort of 'flipper' for both attack and self-righting. Some of these things could flip a car, no trouble.
And then HypnoDisc appeared, just a low-slung trolley with a disc on top. A flywheel, steel, maybe 18" diameter and about 2" thick with a grinding surface around the perimeter. Thbe first disc I'd seen that clearly did the oft-claimed several thousand rpm. Which ofd course gave the thing gyroscopic stability - not actually flippable.
Up til then, bouts had ended with a flip, perhaps some damage from a pick or saw, maybe a small fire. This thing rewrote the game - to win you need to show aggression, but the slightest contact with the disc tended to leave the attacker, how best to put this, digested. Wherever contact was made, just a big hole full of tiny, twisted, mangled, unrecognisable tangles of junk.
And at that point it was clear that an evolutionary fork had arrived.
I can't wait to see what comes next - because whatever it is it wil be surprising.
Oh, and there's also a special joy to watching some University's 20,000 quid 3-year project get ripped up by somethnig put together in a garden shed in 3 weeks for a couple of hundred.
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."
These do _not_ produce any toxins themselves. Instead, they were modified to be resistant to Roundup, a glycophosphate based herbicide
You're quite right, Monsanto modified Canola does not contain any toxins.
It's Monsanto's Bt-Maize(tm) which contains toxins. Specifically,the "Bacillus Thuringiensis" (Bt) toxin included to combat the corn borer. Unfortunately this insecticide has a nasty side effect of... killing insects.
Slashdot Mirror
From the press release...
...which would suggest they're both big and good.
They're a spun-off joint venture between General Motors, Sumitomo Special Metals and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.
What I found interesting was that their attorney is one Archibald Cox. Now if that's the Watergate Special Prosecutor, then they're not exactly skimping on the legal firepower, are they?
Based on the same broad ignorance as every other poster to this story, I'd say this looks like a pretty credible legal attack, as long as the patent's there. And since it's not on Magnets, but the use of certain Neodymium compounds to make high-powered magnets, it might well be.
TomV
This used to be the case. We now live in the insane world of the WTO Treaty, under which everything is subsumed to Free Trade. And that certainly *does* include health and safety.
So now, in the example posited, what is 'meant' to hapen is that the company attempting to sell the 450V 63A 3-phase teddybears into the UK, when it's stymied by the UK's Trading Standards laws, goes to the relevant international court, sues the UK government for restraint of trade, and the UK has to (a) pay huge punitive damages, and (b) remove the offending legislation.
In short, under WTO rules, sovereignty is something which applies to Companies and not to Countries. And therefore it is no business of any government to make any laws which could offend any company anywhere in the world, no matter how repulsive its business practices.
Now, I am NOT suggesting that this is a good thing. But it IS international law as it currently stands. And that's why the demonstrations in Seattle, Prague, Quebec and so on are not necessarily 100% bad.
TomV
Physically interrupting network connections to various countries. ...
The EU would attempt to block traffic to and from a certain set of IP addresss....
Much simpler than that, actually. In the great Tony Blair tradition, here'sthe Third Way:
The European party to the data exchange gets charged, tried and convicted, has to pay a gargantuan amount in fines and punitive damages, loses it's credit rating dueto the judgements against it, and potentially its directors spend a bit of time behind bars.
That would tend to work quite well
TomV
The UK one does a pretty good job of both. OK, it's not perfect, but what is? You'll get the operation eventually. Your first class letter will almost certainly arrive at its destination for 9am the next day.
And if there's a popular will for the government to do something, even if it seems unlikely to succeed then that government ought to make a sincere effort. Democracy, it's called.
The right to Privacy is enshrined in the European Declaration on Human Rights. It's a bit like the US Constitution insofar as it provides a set of principles which national laws within the EU can't breach. And rather a good thing, too.
TomV
We're one such company. Our UK presence has data-sharing agreements with a sister company in the US (they do our web-hosting, amongst other things, so need some subscriber-related data).
I'm not sure of the details, but basically we had to draw up a data-handling contract between the UK and US companies, defining very specifically how transfers of personal data would be dealt with, and protected in the US. This then went to the Data Protection Registrar for approval, and once approved we could just get on with it.
The regualtions don't prevent all EU-outside transfers of personal data, they simply state that if the 'default' protection in the other territory isn't up to scratch, further binding conditions must be applied before data is transferred.
TomV
It was Hooke, his long-standing rival for the succession at the Royal Society.
The issue was the idea that white light was made up of colours, as expounded in Hooke's "micrographia". The Giants, if there were any, were the likes of Descartes. Hooke was described as being 'of low and crooked stature'
And Newton was a remarkably unpleasant chap by any standards. Although being a closet heretic probably didn't help his attitudes in a world where he could have easily got burned at the stake for a slip of the tongue. Had plenty of nasty digs at Leibniz over the calculus, too, but this one was aimed at Hooke.
TomV
Linus never ceases to amaze.
Perfect quote from Isaac Newton to counter all that Microsoft has been saying.
Great reply
Except...
This quote is often used to illustrate the humility of Newton. In these cases, it's a misquote.
Newton claimed to have discovered that white light was made up of mixed colours. Robert Hooke claimed that Newton had stolen the idea from his own Micrographia. Hooke is generally described as 'crooked and low of stature' and Newton and Hooke were long-standing rivals for primacy at The Royal Society (we're talking big money prizes here). The quote is from Newton's rebuttal of this accusation.
So basically the standard Newton quote was a typically nasty, snide put-down to Hooke, saying "even if I did steal these ideas, I certainly didn't steal them from a dwarf like you"
Maybe Linus is saying if he wants commercial ideas he'd rather get them from Bell Labs than from M$?
The man was a genius, certainly. But an angel he was not.
Newton was also an alchemist, who learned his stuff from one Thomas Vaughan (alias 'Eugenius Philalethes')
TomV
two undergraduates could introduce a totally new genre into gaming with one game (Elite)
this put me in mind of a friend who's currently doing something that could provide good portfolio (she doesn't need it, it was actually a bit of fun and a chanceto play with WML)...
I'm thinking of WAP Elite. What she's done is re-created the Elite environment in client-server multi-player guise, for WAP phones and emulators. A potential employer could see the site, check the gameplay, because Elite is such a classic, they would rapidly find that she's implemented all the canonical stuff with near-total accuracy, whilst still introducing new stuff (the multiplayer aspect, implementing it in coldFusion and WML etc). They could also see that she's got 300+ players by word of mouth while the game's still in Beta, and plenty of traffic at alt.fan.elite
Now that would get me interested. As would a long list of Quake mods she's done.
Go there. Check it out. Enjoy.
TomV
But if I, as an individual or as a company, choose to buy PCs with no MS products on them (and since the MS Apps only run on the MS OS's, buying a non-windows pc means it's MS-free), then what on earth would give them any rights whatsoever to information about my activities?
If they want to find this info, they can ask their good friends at Intel how many x86 chips they've shipped and then compare that with the sales figures for Windows. That would be intrusive maybe, but ethically reasonable.
But to ask the suppliers for information about someone else's customers is just preposterous. And probably contrary to Data Protection laws in those countries which have them
TomV
It's a partial quote from a paper by Stewart Brand of MIT Media Lab, presented at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Restated in Brand's 'The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT', ISBN 0140097015, published by Viking Penguin in 1987.
The full quote runs:
I can't think of the last time anyone posted toA more accurate rendition might therefore be "I want information to be free"
And if that's flamebait, then mod Stewart Brand down, not me.
TomV
Years ago, sSs were on EMI. EMI own the rights, quite legitimately, to the material they recorded at the time, and publishing rights too.
But the band were dropped years ago, recently reformed, created thir own label and released an new CD, PirateSpace. Tony James, the 'BosSs' of Sputnik, made it abundantly clearthat the reason they reformed was the unexpected presence of many websites devoted to the band, and has repeatedly credited Napster with rekindling their career.
So, if filenames are to be banned based on a band name, here's another fatal flaw. EMI have every right to ban Napstered copies of "Love Missile F1-11". But they have no rights whatsoever over "Welcome to the 21st Century". And yet, if the filters are looking for the string "Sigue Sigue Sputnik"... Well, they deserve to be sued by Sputnikworld records for restraint of trade, since Napster is a preferred means of promotion by the new label.
And this is far from the only example.
TomV
Here's the dead's policy. It's pretty straightforward
But also a special case because it's embedded in 30 years of taper culture. Even before they put out the statement we all knew what the policy would be. A lot of us flatly refuse to buy boots of the Dead. And those who do usually make a point of then redistributing the material as widely as possible to demolish the bootleggers' markets.
(note that I had to remove some "====" spacers from the quote because the lameness filter didn't like them. They appeared to the left and right of the heading, plus a full-width row at the bottom of the quote)TomV
Is it just me, or is this a strong candidate for Non Sequitur Of The Month?
Was Vincent van Gogh a serious artist? Dmitri Shostakovich? Did Solzhenitsyn suddenly become a serious artist on the day he defected, after years of churning out worthless tat?
Sure, lots of highly respected artists have made plenty of money from their art, and I don't for one minute denigrate their success, but plenty more have failed to sell a single work and died penniless.
I'd guess that you come froma culture where money is considered not only the paramount, but actually the only virtue. Such a shame, life can be so much richer if you broaden your horizons a little.
TomV
Sorry, i wasn't as clear as I could have been. The webservers themselves are good old apache. It's the search engine that does controlled-vocabulary and free-text searching across 20 years of backfiles from 1500 journals that's built in assembly language. And for that task, we've been trying to find an alternative in a higher level language for several years now as, not to put too fine a point on it, the assembly guys are becoming an endangered species and we're in BIG trouble when they're gone. So far, nothing looks like coming anywhere close in terms of performance.
Or maybe I should tell you shareholders all about asm v. C, and how your squandering their investment.
I agree entirely that if we were starting from scratch, we'd not be using assembler. But what we have is a legacy system, so we have to balance the costs of incremental development in assembly against the costs of a total redevelopment.
As it happens we're investigating a redevelopment in Java on Websphere at the moment, and it's looking reasonably credible.
TomV
This looks a little biit like the 'html as formatting instructions' fallacy that's damaged the web so badly.
The SGML isn't a question of formatting, particularly not for the dead-tree editions. It's done for the semantics to allow for searchability within our 'electronic warehouse' (those s/370s), as well as to permit stylesheeet-driven formatting for the variety of formats in which the material is made available.
Also bear in mind that there has to be a single file format for all the articles within an issue - by using SGML for this we can give the academics the freedom to use the document preparation tools of their choice. It's not so long ago that publishers had to mandate specific software for their authors, which was obviously not a good approach.
TomV
I work for one of the publishers who refused to be interviewed. One crucial point that was missed was the matter of editorial quality control and peer review. One of the factors that gives aparticular journal its credibility is the mechanism to filter submissions, the moderaton if you like.
When we get a new article, the editor (usually one of an editorial board) takes a look at it and if it's reasonably credible, it goes out for review to several eminent practitioners for peer review, and only after this does it stand any chance of getting published.
We pay the editors. We pay the peer reviewers. We provide them with the necessary equipment (PC's, software, connectivity and so forth) to do the job. We also, later in the process, pay for the SGML markup, proofing, printing, distribution, administration of the subscriptions, protecting the authors' copyright when necessary. Then there's the webservers (in our case a cluster of s/370's with a large team writing assembler for them - we get a LOT of hits requesting very large responses - fulltext with a lot of illustrations) when the electronic versions are released, of course.
This stuff is far from cheap. And it's also worth remembering( this is a legalistic point, not a moral one as I tend to disagree with it on moral grounds somewhat) - we're a listed company, and like it or not we are legally obliged to maximise revenue for our shareholders, so if we were to make an arbitrary decision to free up material with over 49 years of copyright outstanding, it would be only right that our directors would go straight to jail.
But it's mainly the peer review that costs. If you want quality peer reviewers, you'll find they're very busy and in short supply.
TomV
Yup. I *always* go upstream on them. Seems to be a lot more effective.
Another thing to note. Not everyone checks the 'abuse@' address.
So send to 'sales@' as well. You can be absolutely darn tootin' certain someone's checking that one.
Oddly I learned this one in meatspace, on the phone. *Never* bother with the customer service hotline. It's understaffed and underfunded. Call the sales line and you'll find they're very eager to get you off the line so they can make some money. They can be remarkably helpful.
TomV
Currently in Beta, and the more testers the merrier, it's...
Elite for WAP phones. Currently featuring the original Galaxy 1, full trading model, most of the combat, more graphics on the way.
If you don't have a WAP phone, it's playable thru emulators (I prefer the M3Gate one), links available from the site.
Full kudos to Modesty and Dan Catt for all the work.
Try it now, at phink.net
Warning - can seriously damage your productivity. BUT you can get a great price for slaves at Xexedi while you're waiting for the bus.
TomV
Shortsighted. After the Roman empire fell, we spent a good 1000 years concentrating on food and shelter (whilst, it might be added, the Islamic world took the science and philosophy of the Graeco-Roman civilisation and developed them massively).
But after a while, mopre specifically after the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent dispersal of the old knowledge (with its Islamic enhancements, such as arabic numerals, the Zero concept and so forth), the west's intellectual curiosity was rekindled, and at that point, the surviving documents, or transcripts thereof, became hugely valuable.
So based on that example, any archival medium, for the very reasons you mentioned needs to be robust enough to last a good half-millennium. Preferably in a form where the technology needed to read it is minimal, so that it can help with the re-booting of civilisation. So if we leave data in binary form, we also need human-readable instructions for reading it.
TomV
Joe Engressia from Tennessee. Blind and pitch-perfect. Started phreaking aged 8. didn't need a Cap'n Crunch whitle to get his 2600. Becaume a bit of a cause celebre around 1971. Calls himself Joybubbles now.
more about Joybubbles here TomV
Thanks for your sincere concern, but actually, our government-run healthcare system works a whole lot better than our privately-run £1000/second-profitable telecom system. And a darned sight better than the privately-owned recurring lethal diaster that is all that's left of the railway we built with our taxes.
TomV
Methinks you've rather missed the point here. If you and I were Mallory and Irvine contemplating an ascent of Everest, would you say "why would I want to invest a huge amount of money and time if the odds are we'll just freeze to death half way up?"
Behind the shiny brash facade, there's a terribly old-fashioned attitude behind Robot Wars, a blend of the boffin mentality and the corinthian ideal that it's the taking part which counts, and the win is just a bonus. I've seen players laughing their hearts out as their robots get mangled. I've also seen competitors' robots junking the House Robots. Which is always joyous. There have been robots which have won their bout within half a minute and then gone after the house robots just to please the crowd.
Believe me, the house robots are a good thing - they guarantee an entertaining bout even if one competitor robot is a total walkover.
TomV
It's the evolution that keeps me watching. Oh, and the mindless destruction of course.
A classic case in point was a robot that first appeared a year or so ago called HypnoDisc. Up til that point there had been a clear tendency towards wedge-shaped robots with some sort of 'flipper' for both attack and self-righting. Some of these things could flip a car, no trouble.
And then HypnoDisc appeared, just a low-slung trolley with a disc on top. A flywheel, steel, maybe 18" diameter and about 2" thick with a grinding surface around the perimeter. Thbe first disc I'd seen that clearly did the oft-claimed several thousand rpm. Which ofd course gave the thing gyroscopic stability - not actually flippable.
Up til then, bouts had ended with a flip, perhaps some damage from a pick or saw, maybe a small fire. This thing rewrote the game - to win you need to show aggression, but the slightest contact with the disc tended to leave the attacker, how best to put this, digested. Wherever contact was made, just a big hole full of tiny, twisted, mangled, unrecognisable tangles of junk.
And at that point it was clear that an evolutionary fork had arrived.
I can't wait to see what comes next - because whatever it is it wil be surprising.
Oh, and there's also a special joy to watching some University's 20,000 quid 3-year project get ripped up by somethnig put together in a garden shed in 3 weeks for a couple of hundred.
TomV
I thought Jonathan Swift put it rather more elegantly back in 1729. In particular:
Score -1 Redundant.TomV
These do _not_ produce any toxins themselves. Instead, they were modified to be resistant to Roundup, a glycophosphate based herbicide
You're quite right, Monsanto modified Canola does not contain any toxins.
It's Monsanto's Bt-Maize(tm) which contains toxins. Specifically,the "Bacillus Thuringiensis" (Bt) toxin included to combat the corn borer. Unfortunately this insecticide has a nasty side effect of... killing insects.
TomV