It is sad that only a fraction of his works have been translated to English. His phylosophical look at evolution, society, technology and the human kind in general, titled Summa Technologiae, is an astionishing book. He dumps ideas on you so fast that sometimes it takes half a day just to digest 2-3 pages of the book.
He was one of those whose books had actual content and were more than mere entertainment.
That's why he, when he is not banning games, states that it is necessary to wire-tap people who are not suspects of any crimes (why, they *might* one they become suspicious!) or promote the idea (so much so that it is the law) that promoting the idea of the forceful removal of the (sorry, "The") Government is worth quite a few years in behind bars. And he is right, because if you cant trust the Government...
He loves us, he and our wise government do indeed, they are our true Big Brothers and we have to trust them without reservation.
> Strange, I have been using OO Writer since it was StarWriter 5.0 for DOS and > the outline numbering has worked for all legal documents I have made. I have > also used it on a doctorate paper and countless technical documentations.
OK, let's assume that you are in chapter 2, subchapter 4 sub-subchapter 3. Chapters are using roman numerals, subchapters arabic numerals and sub-sub chapters letters, so in OO's usual notation we are at II.4.c
Now try to create any of the following outline number formats:
II.4(c) (often used in legal) II.4/c (ditto) II 4c or II-4-c or just II 4 c Or maybe you want a different order, say "4c of II"?
Alas, OO's outline numbering can't do that. The numbers can only be in the natural order (i.e. chapter, sub, sub-sub and so on) and there can not be anything but a single period between them. I avoid MS like the plague, but Word can easily do all the above. The above problem was reported several times since SO6 times (by me, others may have reported it earlier) and nothing is done.
Now the next tricky issue with outline numbering that it is strictly one style to one level. If you have a Heading1 style for your chapters (outline numbering level 1) and then you want to create appendices, you have to create the whole new header hierarchy for the appendix, because you can't tell OO's otline numbering system that it - should change the numbering style from this point - should reset the counter at this point
These features were all available in ApplixWare way back in the late nineties (it's a shame that it died), plus a lot more.
Also, OO's Chart is just a toy. It's so bad that it is literary unusable for any scientific or engineering purpose. It was stated that the Chart module was to be rewritten for SO7/OO1.x then SO8/OO2.x and now I guess SO9/OO3.x.
So, OO is very far from perfect. The user interface, numbering and charts in ApplixWare some seven years ago were lightyears ahead of OO's current offering. Even Word can do a few things that OO can't. Try to build complex documents with master document templates and such.
Don't get me wrong, I use OO day by day. The old one, actually, because 2.x didn't fix the things that were broken in the old one (but broke, for example, the presentation if you don't run KDE or Gnome) and the new look and feel is just not worth it. I'm sure that it's more than adequete for most people. However, from my niche it's just not that crash hot. I couldn't care less if I can rotate 3D objects using OpenGL (although it looks very impressive) but I do care that I can't create a chart where two X-Y datasets have different X values or where the X data is in a column and the Y in a row (don't even think about a data series that is spatially not continuous - although, of course, ApplixWare did that happily). I also care about the user interface giving me modal windows and interface elements that pop up and disappear depending on the cursor position in the text. In ApplixWare, of course, there were no modal windows (apart from error messages and file requesters) and the various settings windows did not disappear (they just greyed themselves out fully or partially if they were not applicable to the context) so all your windows always were where you had put them, you didn't have to close them and when they were applicable, they also gave you immediate info about the context, as if someone was thinking about user interface design before coding.
In short, I think OO is very, very feature-rich but sometimes functionally challenged.
Considering that according to a panel of "15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders" assembled by Human Events the Club of Rome's Limits of Growth is the 29th most harmful book ever written (Darwin's Origin of Species is 19th and Keynes' General Theory of Emplyment, Interest and Money just made to the top-10 list) and the increasingly obvious oppressive behaviour of the current administration it is not very surprising.
> Paying the legal expenses and fines of one Texas teen isn't joining the fight. It's a publicity > stunt. If they want to join the fight, then they should use their clout and cash to take a more > substantive swipe at the RIAA than just a tiny, ineffective gesture.
It is a very big step. RIAA suing a kid is not newsworthy. A Canadian company standing up against an American organisation to protect an American kid *is* news. Copyright law will not be fixed until the masses realise how bad the situation is and they start to make noise. Then the politicians realise that fighting **AA means popularity that means votes. There are always lobby groups who will grease your palm but you have to be there in the first place and you need voters for that. The only issue important to a carreer politician is the one that directly affects the votes.
Whether the Canadian company wants to get the "do no evil" image or wants to piss off the RIAA just for fun or they happen to believe that a fairer copyright system means a less monopolised but more lucrative and dynamic business environment (for the smaller publishers) is not important. Whatever the reason they stood up against the RIAA, they did and it's going to be a lot harder to the RIAA to mow them down than a 12 year old kid or a grandma. While they fight, a lot of people will get enlightened about copyright and that is a Very Good Thing.
Yes, you are right. I made the very mistake that I was preaching about with the conditional probabilities. I stated (and assumed) that the popping baloon excercise is the same as the doors but it is not. The door experiment is rigged, because in baloon terms it is guaranteed that if your chosen baloon is *not* the last one, then it would be the one before the last (your door will never be opened even if it is a wrong door). The opening of the other door(s) is just smoke and mirrors, the real problem boils down to a "choose a door at random and then choose if you think that the treasure is behind that door or behind any of the other doors". Indeed, a nice one.
> (of course, 2/3 of the time it's better to switch but most people can't figure out the logic so it's a bit of a moot point)
Actually, it is not better, you have 50% chance. Yes, there is that argument that when you chose the initial door you had 1/3 chance and they show you a door that is definitely not the correct one, so you have a 2/3 chance that the third door is the good one. The problem with that argument is that it is plain wrong. You can very simply figure it out if you count all possibilities. We can assume that you choose door A, and just see what possibilities there are and whether changing helps or not:
-The treasure is behind A, they open B -> changing is bad -The treasure is behind A, they open C -> changing is bad -The treasure is behind B, they open C -> changing is good -The treasure is behind C, they open B -> changing is good
There are no more possibilities if your initial door was A and all cases are equally probable, so you have 50 percent chance. If you initially choose B or C, the above schema still holds.
The issue with opening doors giving you more information is that it is a conditional probability excercise and if you do the actual maths, you will see that your chance goes up from 1/3 to 1/2, but you can't get higher than that. If you have a 1000 doors, then your initial chance was 1/1000 and you can increase that to 50%, but not more.
The doors and treasures can be changed to an other form: there are 3 baloons being pumbed up from a gas cilinder. Sooner or later all 3 will pop. Your question is, which one will pop last. You chose one, then an other pops and then you still do not know if the next one will be your chosen one or the other one. It is the exact same problem, with different clothing.
> Everybody and their dogs keep on saying this on slashdot. Surely the obligation is to keep their > shareholders happy? This may equate to almost the same thing (shareholders want a return on their > investment), but it is slightly different.
The principal reason of a public company is to make profit for the shareholders. If the shareholders believe that the company could have made profit but it did not do so, they can actually sue the board of directors for lost return on investment. They can not sue the board of directors for not being happy or because they wanted the company image to be different. They have legal recourse for lost monies, that being the principal reason behind a corporation.
Considering that shares of a public company can be owned by anyone, the only objective measure of shareholder happiness is return on investment.
> Google is heavily based on Linux. One would expect they to support it.
Not really. They use linux for its technical features and for the rather attractive pricetag it comes with.
On the other hand, Google is a publicly traded company and no matter what the blurb is in the various vision and mission statements, they have one and only one legaly binding obligation: making money to their shareholders. Linux and BSD and MacOS and Solaris and all the other non-Windows based customers probably represent a single-digit percentage of their visitors. Say 10%. Now they develop a particular product and porting it to Linux and BSD and MacOS and Solaris costs them more than 10% of the Windows development cost, it is not worth doing it.
For the very same reason jumping on them for DRM is silly. They want to make money. Content delivery is good business. To get content from the providers, you must have DRM. So they'll do DRM. Google do things differently than a lot of other company, but their bottom line is no different from Hollywood's or Microsoft's: max amount of $$$. If they can create an image that they are a different company, geek friendly, do no harm, whatever, that's just very good PR. At the end of the day the shareholders are only interested in the share price and the dividend and couldn't care less what the slashdotters think of the company's business decisions.
Zoltan
Re:Everyone loves to hate patents, but...
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 1
You know what, I would not mind to pay researchers and engineers and inventors out of my taxes and then get the damned thing be made in China on the cheap. In the long run it seems to be a rather nice proposition for society as a whole. Yes, individual companies, especially the ones that are based on the "very high profit margin protected by evergreen patents" and "buy submarine patents and sue a rich sucker for out of court settlement" business models would suffer or even go bankrupt. On the other hand, development would not be set back (most researchers I know do it because they like what they do and not because they even dream of getting rich of what they do) but the end result would be available a lot more readily to everyone.
> It's kind of funny.. they're based in Australia, and they can serve > everyone but citizens of their own country...
What's new? The government in Canberra has been doing it for ages...
Re:Know and love GCC
on
GCC 4.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> I see them more as a symbiosis. > > Where would GCC be without Linux? > Where would Linux be without GCC?
Well, I was using gcc way before Linux hit the streets. Gcc and the GNU tools were the compiler and utility package that you could run on a bunch of systems without much tweaking of your makefiles. The same input created a binary with the same behaviour. So, I think gcc would be alive and well without Linux. On the other hand, Linux was possible because of the availibility of the GNU tools. So, RMS actually has a point in insisting that it should be called GNU/Linux. As soon as you log in, you probably run bash (GNU), when you type rm, ls, cc, make and so on, it is likely that you invoke a GNU tool or even if not, whatever you start will quicly suck in the C library (GNU).
> The justification for legal sanction is more complex, though I like > the American version, that encouraging creativity is beneficial for the society.
I wonder how much creativity it generates that when you make a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it you have to pay royalty to a corporation because Mickey was drawn by someone who is dead for more than half a century... I know the zombie theme is in vogue in the films but somehow I doubt that Walt Disney's skeleton comes back during the nights to dream up new characters and, of course, to take *his* reward for *his* creation as opposed to make some fatcat directors and shareholders even richer...
In that case a lot of the SF literature can be considered as prior art. If someone comes up with a positronic robotic brain, it's not patentable because Asimov have described it, at least to the depth of this patent. The SF literature is full of detailed solutions to antigravity, space- and timewarp, travel, modification and so on. They are very sound, maybe except for some minor detail at the root of the explanation, that is 'left as an excercise to the reader'. Even the space-ramjet has been invented in some book I read, the idea being that if you go fast enough you can collect enough interstellar hydrogen on the intake to run a sustained fusion reaction and blow helium plasma out on the back, propelling you with almost light speed costing you absolute nothing. In fact, it generates a lot of excess energy to run the ship *and* if you put a bit of the collected hydrogen aside, you can have fuel for an auxcilliary low-speed engine. Some minor things of course have to be solved, such as the sustained nuclear fusion, but other than that, it should be patentable, it was at least as well described in that book as the anti-gravitational drive in this patent.
> Section 6785. > > You will never call the Software a Piece Of Shit in public or in private.
It is not funny at all. It is, sadly, reality. EULAs can and do state that you can not compare the software to other offerings, can not benchmark it and can not publish negative opinion on it. Not calling it a piece of shit in the privacy of your home is not allowed as such, it just simply can not be monitored effectively yet.
> Can Bush create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it?
That's not the real question. The problem is that destroying science and letting religious fundamentalists run the country is more akin to lifting a stone so heavy that you can't put it down...
> America is hated largely because we are number one in terms of GDP, freedom, etc. I say let someone else take that spot at the top (at least in GDP) so the rest of the world can hate them for a while.
America is not hated because you have more GDP or freedom than the rest of the world. You are hated because you attack and destroy countries and sovereign governments when your economic interest dictates that, in the name of "liberating" the population (well, the part which you do not kill) while you do not give a hoot about hundreds of thousand dying when there is no money for you in it. You are hated because you toot around against WMDs whlie you are the largest developers of named WMDs and, in fact, the only one who used nuclear weapons against civilian targets. You are hated because you refuse to care about the environment because it would hurt your bottom line and the rest of the world suffers from your ignorance. You are hated because you define what "freedom" must mean to the rest of the world: the American Way of Life. Everyone who thinks differently is an enemy of Freedom and Liberty and the enemy of the US of A. You are hated because you set up dictators when it suits you then try to depose them, with all your military might, when they do not toe the party line any more. Never mind how many people die in both turn and never mind what gets destroyed, as long as weapons sale profits are high enough. You are not hated but looked down for touting freedom when you had seggregation just 30 years ago, for warning parents that the Origin of Species contains dangerous theories that are not in the Bible, for having a patent system that allows you to patent a way of combing your hair to cover a bald spot, for cranking out movie after movie with no plot but more blood and explosion than a slaghterhouse hit by a Pershing and you call it "culture" but in the same time you have no problem destroying many thousand year old remnants of human history - all in all, that was not American, thus it must have been worthless. You are looked down for being the largest porn manufacturing industry but with an unbelievable hypocricy make nudity a deadly sin. You talk about freedom but ban gay marriages. You talk about women's rights but ban abortus even to an underage rape victim. The idea that the world envies you is false. It comes from the idea that the US is, by definition, the best. Therefore obviously the world wants to be like the US just evil forces want to stop development and in order to liberate the world in their quest to finally living "our way of life", as your great leader puts it in every speech, you should attack them by economic, political and military needs. The fallacy in the whole ideology is that the rest of the world does not want to live like you. Europe appreciates her own decadent ways you know, with all that culture rubbish and lack of rights to have machine guns but with some rights of not being killed by your fellow citizens. Asia has a culture that is a lot more ancient than even Europe's and they seem to be doing reasonably OK with it, thank you very much. Africa is just too poor to have its priorities around freedom and ideology, they think about the food and water and medication more than their liberty.
Noone would have a problem with the US wanting to lead the world. The problem is that you do not want to lead, you want to rule.
> They did have an issue once and that was > only with some purposefully obscure math.
Um, it was a division. Hardly obscure math... If the divisor has some particular binary pattern the result was incorrect. The problem was that you could not *trust* the computer, because you did not know if a particular Excel spreadsheet hit that binary pattern or not. Intel indeed recalled the chips, after first denying the existence of the bug.
> What is this 'correct English' of which you speak? > Can you send me a copy of the official English language handbook?
E.g. M. Swan: Practical English Usage (or, for a less advanced reader Basic English Usage). Or, say The Oxford English Grammar for poms, The Webster's New World English Grammar Handbook for yanks. Look for English + grammar at Amazon, you will find a huge wealth of knowledge about the subject. There is (regionally) correct English and it is documented.
The solution to common errors should not be to dumb down the language but to educate the people. Of course it requires money (and willingness to risk having better educated constituents) from the government, a lot of patience and hard work from the teachers and, sadly, effort and an interest in being educated from the students.
The process is almost realistic, except that Snooty Journal requests the author to pay for the publication, in the range of $2000, plus about $1000 per colour picture. Therefore, Snooty Journal puts a footnote to the article stating that the article is legally a paid advertisement. The author is also signing the copyright over to Snooty Journal. Due to the journal being compulsory for members of the Society of the given discipline (i.e. everyone in the field), it has the highest readership index, therefore, publishing in Snooty Journal is quasi prerequisitie for being taken seriously. Now *that* is a business model and you don't even have to rage around to hunt for intellectual property thiev pirates and you don't have to pay a single cent for advertising the "artists".
"Terry's article also mentions that a recent Wellcome report found that an author-pays business model has the opportunity for a saving of 30 % on publishing costs alone compared to reader-pays."
Some papers take it to the ultimate level. The IOVS (and ophthalmology research paper, huge readership) figured out how to mix all models. - The reader pays, subscription is compulsory if you are a member of the international society of ophthalmic research. - The paper is full of advertisements - It's peer revieved, revievers get nothing - Authors pay for publication (and the paper puts a footnote for each article, indicating that since the author paid, the article legally is paid advertisement), colour pictures are extra. - Authors also assign copyright to the paper (don't know the exact terms).
So, the best of all worlds: author, reader, advertiser - they all pay! 3: Profit!!!
Slashdot Mirror
It is sad that only a fraction of his works have been translated
to English. His phylosophical look at evolution, society, technology
and the human kind in general, titled Summa Technologiae, is an astionishing
book. He dumps ideas on you so fast that sometimes it takes half a day just
to digest 2-3 pages of the book.
He was one of those whose books had actual content and were more than mere
entertainment.
Zoltan
That's why he, when he is not banning games, states that it is necessary to wire-tap people who are not suspects of any crimes (why, they *might* one they become suspicious!) or promote the idea (so much so that it is the law) that promoting the idea of the forceful removal of the (sorry, "The") Government is worth quite a few years in behind bars. And he is right, because if you cant trust the Government...
He loves us, he and our wise government do indeed, they are our true Big Brothers and we have to trust them without reservation.
> Strange, I have been using OO Writer since it was StarWriter 5.0 for DOS and
> the outline numbering has worked for all legal documents I have made. I have
> also used it on a doctorate paper and countless technical documentations.
OK, let's assume that you are in chapter 2, subchapter 4 sub-subchapter 3.
Chapters are using roman numerals, subchapters arabic numerals and sub-sub chapters letters,
so in OO's usual notation we are at II.4.c
Now try to create any of the following outline number formats:
II.4(c) (often used in legal)
II.4/c (ditto)
II 4c or II-4-c or just II 4 c
Or maybe you want a different order, say "4c of II"?
Alas, OO's outline numbering can't do that. The numbers can only be in the natural order (i.e. chapter, sub, sub-sub and so on) and there can not be anything but a single period between them. I avoid MS like the plague, but Word can easily do all the above. The above problem was reported several times since SO6 times (by me, others may have reported it earlier) and nothing is done.
Now the next tricky issue with outline numbering that it is strictly one style to one level. If you have a Heading1 style for your chapters (outline numbering level 1) and then you want to create appendices, you have to create the whole new header hierarchy for the appendix, because you can't tell OO's otline numbering system that it
- should change the numbering style from this point
- should reset the counter at this point
These features were all available in ApplixWare way back in the late nineties (it's a shame that it died), plus a lot more.
Also, OO's Chart is just a toy. It's so bad that it is literary unusable for any scientific or engineering purpose. It was stated that the Chart module was to be rewritten for SO7/OO1.x then SO8/OO2.x and now I guess SO9/OO3.x.
So, OO is very far from perfect. The user interface, numbering and charts in ApplixWare some seven years ago were lightyears ahead of OO's current offering. Even Word can do a few things that OO can't. Try to build complex documents with master document templates and such.
Don't get me wrong, I use OO day by day. The old one, actually, because 2.x didn't fix the things that were broken in the old one (but broke, for example, the presentation if you don't run KDE or Gnome) and the new look and feel is just not worth it. I'm sure that it's more than adequete for most people. However, from my niche it's just not that crash hot. I couldn't care less if I can rotate 3D objects using OpenGL (although it looks very impressive) but I do care that I can't create a chart where two X-Y datasets have different X values or where the X data is
in a column and the Y in a row (don't even think about a data series that is spatially not continuous - although, of course, ApplixWare did that happily). I also care about the user interface giving me modal windows and interface elements that pop up and disappear depending on the cursor position in the text. In ApplixWare, of course, there were no modal windows (apart from error messages and file requesters) and the various settings windows did not disappear (they just greyed themselves out fully or partially if they were not applicable to the context) so all your windows always were where you had put them, you didn't have to close them and when they were applicable, they also gave you immediate info about the context, as if someone was thinking about user interface design before coding.
In short, I think OO is very, very feature-rich but sometimes functionally challenged.
Zoltan
Considering that according to a panel of "15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders" assembled by Human Events the Club of Rome's Limits of Growth is the 29th most harmful book ever written (Darwin's Origin of Species is 19th and Keynes' General Theory of Emplyment, Interest and Money just made to the top-10 list) and the increasingly obvious oppressive behaviour of the current administration it is not very surprising.
> Paying the legal expenses and fines of one Texas teen isn't joining the fight. It's a publicity
> stunt. If they want to join the fight, then they should use their clout and cash to take a more
> substantive swipe at the RIAA than just a tiny, ineffective gesture.
It is a very big step. RIAA suing a kid is not newsworthy. A Canadian company standing up against
an American organisation to protect an American kid *is* news. Copyright law will not be fixed until
the masses realise how bad the situation is and they start to make noise. Then the politicians realise
that fighting **AA means popularity that means votes. There are always lobby groups who
will grease your palm but you have to be there in the first place and you need voters for that.
The only issue important to a carreer politician is the one that directly affects the votes.
Whether the Canadian company wants to get the "do no evil" image or wants to piss off the RIAA just for fun or
they happen to believe that a fairer copyright system means a less monopolised but more lucrative and dynamic
business environment (for the smaller publishers) is not important. Whatever the reason they stood up against the RIAA,
they did and it's going to be a lot harder to the RIAA to mow them down than a 12 year old kid or a grandma.
While they fight, a lot of people will get enlightened about copyright and that is a Very Good Thing.
Yes, you are right.
I made the very mistake that I was preaching about with the conditional probabilities.
I stated (and assumed) that the popping baloon excercise is the same as the doors but it is not.
The door experiment is rigged, because in baloon terms it is guaranteed that if your chosen baloon
is *not* the last one, then it would be the one before the last (your door will never be opened even
if it is a wrong door).
The opening of the other door(s) is just smoke and mirrors, the real problem boils down to a
"choose a door at random and then choose if you think that the treasure is behind that door
or behind any of the other doors". Indeed, a nice one.
> (of course, 2/3 of the time it's better to switch but most people can't figure out the logic so it's a bit of a moot point)
Actually, it is not better, you have 50% chance. Yes, there is that argument that when you chose the initial door you had 1/3 chance and they show you a door that is definitely not the correct one, so you have a 2/3 chance that the third door is the good one. The problem with that argument is that it is plain wrong. You can very simply figure it out if you count all possibilities. We can assume that you choose door A, and just see what possibilities there are and whether changing helps or not:
-The treasure is behind A, they open B -> changing is bad
-The treasure is behind A, they open C -> changing is bad
-The treasure is behind B, they open C -> changing is good
-The treasure is behind C, they open B -> changing is good
There are no more possibilities if your initial door was A and all cases are equally probable, so you have 50 percent chance. If you initially choose B or C, the above schema still holds.
The issue with opening doors giving you more information is that it is a conditional probability excercise and if you do the actual maths, you will see that your chance goes up from 1/3 to 1/2, but you can't get higher than that. If you have a 1000 doors, then your initial chance was 1/1000 and you can increase that to 50%, but not more.
The doors and treasures can be changed to an other form: there are 3 baloons being pumbed up from a gas cilinder. Sooner or later all 3 will pop. Your question is, which one will pop last. You chose one, then an other pops and then you still do not know if the next one will be your chosen one or the other one. It is the exact same problem, with different clothing.
> Everybody and their dogs keep on saying this on slashdot. Surely the obligation is to keep their
> shareholders happy? This may equate to almost the same thing (shareholders want a return on their
> investment), but it is slightly different.
The principal reason of a public company is to make profit for the shareholders. If the shareholders believe that the company could have made profit but it did not do so, they can actually sue the board of directors for lost return on investment. They can not sue the board of directors for not being happy or because they wanted the company image to be different. They have legal recourse for lost monies, that being the principal reason behind a corporation.
Considering that shares of a public company can be owned by anyone, the only objective measure of shareholder happiness is return on investment.
> Google is heavily based on Linux. One would expect they to support it.
Not really. They use linux for its technical features and for the rather attractive pricetag it comes with.
On the other hand, Google is a publicly traded company and no matter what the blurb is in the various vision and mission statements, they have one and only one legaly binding obligation: making money to their shareholders.
Linux and BSD and MacOS and Solaris and all the other non-Windows based customers probably represent a single-digit percentage of their visitors. Say 10%. Now they develop a particular product and porting it to Linux and BSD and MacOS and Solaris costs them more than 10% of the Windows development cost, it is not worth doing it.
For the very same reason jumping on them for DRM is silly. They want to make money. Content delivery is good business. To get content from the providers, you must have DRM. So they'll do DRM. Google do things differently than a lot of other company, but their bottom line is no different from Hollywood's or Microsoft's: max amount of $$$. If they can create an image that they are a different company, geek friendly, do no harm, whatever, that's just very good PR. At the end of the day the shareholders are only interested in the share price and the dividend and couldn't care less what the slashdotters think of the company's business decisions.
Zoltan
You know what, I would not mind to pay researchers and engineers and inventors out of my taxes and then get the damned thing be made in China on the cheap. In the long run it seems to be a rather nice proposition for society as a whole. Yes, individual companies, especially the ones that are based on the "very high profit margin protected by evergreen patents" and "buy submarine patents and sue a rich sucker for out of court settlement" business models would suffer or even go bankrupt. On the other hand, development would not be set back (most researchers I know do it because they like what they do and not because they even dream of getting rich of what they do) but the end result would be available a lot more readily to everyone.
Zoltan
And, as they say, every nation deserves its elected leaders...
> It's kind of funny.. they're based in Australia, and they can serve
> everyone but citizens of their own country...
What's new? The government in Canberra has been doing it for ages...
> I see them more as a symbiosis.
>
> Where would GCC be without Linux?
> Where would Linux be without GCC?
Well, I was using gcc way before Linux hit the streets. Gcc and the GNU tools were the compiler and utility package that you could run on a bunch of systems without much tweaking of your makefiles. The same input created a binary with the same behaviour. So, I think gcc would be alive and well without Linux. On the other hand, Linux was possible because of the availibility of the GNU tools. So, RMS actually has a point in insisting that it should be called GNU/Linux. As soon as you log in, you probably run bash (GNU), when you type rm, ls, cc, make and so on, it is likely that you invoke a GNU tool or even if not, whatever you start will quicly suck in the C library (GNU).
Zoltan
> The justification for legal sanction is more complex, though I like
> the American version, that encouraging creativity is beneficial for the society.
I wonder how much creativity it generates that when you make a T-shirt with Mickey
Mouse on it you have to pay royalty to a corporation because Mickey was drawn by
someone who is dead for more than half a century... I know the zombie theme is in
vogue in the films but somehow I doubt that Walt Disney's skeleton comes back during
the nights to dream up new characters and, of course, to take *his* reward for *his*
creation as opposed to make some fatcat directors and shareholders even richer...
In that case a lot of the SF literature can be considered as prior art.
If someone comes up with a positronic robotic brain, it's not patentable
because Asimov have described it, at least to the depth of this patent.
The SF literature is full of detailed solutions to antigravity, space-
and timewarp, travel, modification and so on. They are very sound, maybe
except for some minor detail at the root of the explanation, that is 'left
as an excercise to the reader'. Even the space-ramjet has been invented in
some book I read, the idea being that if you go fast enough you can collect
enough interstellar hydrogen on the intake to run a sustained fusion reaction
and blow helium plasma out on the back, propelling you with almost light speed
costing you absolute nothing. In fact, it generates a lot of excess energy to
run the ship *and* if you put a bit of the collected hydrogen aside, you can
have fuel for an auxcilliary low-speed engine. Some minor things of course have
to be solved, such as the sustained nuclear fusion, but other than that, it should
be patentable, it was at least as well described in that book as the anti-gravitational
drive in this patent.
> Section 6785.
>
> You will never call the Software a Piece Of Shit in public or in private.
It is not funny at all. It is, sadly, reality. EULAs can and do state that you can not compare the software to other offerings, can not benchmark it and can not publish negative opinion on it. Not calling it a piece of shit in the privacy of your home is not allowed as such, it just simply can not be monitored effectively yet.
> Yes... I'm paranoid. But given the trends lately, can you *really* blame me?
:-(
Nope, you are not paranoid. Just a realist. With little imagination
> Can Bush create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it?
That's not the real question. The problem is that destroying
science and letting religious fundamentalists run the country
is more akin to lifting a stone so heavy that you can't put it
down...
> There is no vaccine against bird flu. At least not yet.
Mere facts would not deter Tony Abbot from saying whetever is
politically or financially advantageous at any given moment...
> America is hated largely because we are number one in terms of GDP, freedom, etc. I say let someone else take that spot at the top (at least in GDP) so the rest of the world can hate them for a while.
America is not hated because you have more GDP or freedom than the rest of the world. You are hated because you attack and destroy countries and sovereign governments when your economic interest dictates that, in the name of "liberating" the population (well, the part which you do not kill) while you do not give a hoot about hundreds of thousand dying when there is no money for you in it.
You are hated because you toot around against WMDs whlie you are the largest developers of named WMDs and, in fact, the only one who used nuclear weapons against civilian targets.
You are hated because you refuse to care about the environment because it would hurt your bottom line and the rest of the world suffers from your ignorance. You are hated because you define what "freedom" must mean to the rest of the world: the American Way of Life. Everyone who thinks differently is an enemy of Freedom and Liberty and the enemy of the US of A.
You are hated because you set up dictators when it suits you then try to depose them, with all your military might, when they do not toe the party line any more. Never mind how many people die in both turn and never mind what gets destroyed, as long as weapons sale profits are high enough.
You are not hated but looked down for touting freedom when you had seggregation just 30 years ago, for warning parents that the Origin of Species contains dangerous theories that are not in the Bible, for having a patent system that allows you to patent a way of combing your hair to cover a bald spot, for cranking out movie after movie with no plot but more blood and explosion than a slaghterhouse hit by a Pershing and you call it "culture" but in the same time you have no problem destroying many thousand year old remnants of human history - all in all, that was not American, thus it must have been worthless. You are looked down for being the largest porn manufacturing industry but with an unbelievable hypocricy make nudity a deadly sin. You talk about freedom but ban gay marriages. You talk about women's rights but ban abortus even to an underage rape victim.
The idea that the world envies you is false. It comes from the idea that the US is, by definition, the best. Therefore obviously the world wants to be like the US just evil forces want to stop development and in order to liberate the world in their quest to finally living "our way of life", as your great leader puts it in every speech, you should attack them by economic, political and military needs. The fallacy in the whole ideology is that the rest of the world does not want to live like you. Europe appreciates her own decadent ways you know, with all that culture rubbish and lack of rights to have machine guns but with some rights of not being killed by your fellow citizens. Asia has a culture that is a lot more ancient than even Europe's and they seem to be doing reasonably OK with it, thank you very much. Africa is just too poor to have its priorities around freedom and ideology, they think about the food and water and medication more than their liberty.
Noone would have a problem with the US wanting to lead the world.
The problem is that you do not want to lead, you want to rule.
> They did have an issue once and that was
> only with some purposefully obscure math.
Um, it was a division. Hardly obscure math...
If the divisor has some particular binary
pattern the result was incorrect. The problem
was that you could not *trust* the computer,
because you did not know if a particular Excel
spreadsheet hit that binary pattern or not.
Intel indeed recalled the chips, after first
denying the existence of the bug.
> What is this 'correct English' of which you speak?
> Can you send me a copy of the official English language handbook?
E.g. M. Swan: Practical English Usage (or, for a less advanced reader Basic English Usage).
Or, say The Oxford English Grammar for poms, The Webster's New World English Grammar Handbook for yanks.
Look for English + grammar at Amazon, you will find a huge wealth of knowledge about the subject.
There is (regionally) correct English and it is documented.
The solution to common errors should not be to dumb down the language but to educate the people. Of course it requires money (and willingness to risk having better educated constituents) from the government, a lot of patience and hard work from the teachers and, sadly, effort and an interest in being educated from the students.
The process is almost realistic, except that Snooty Journal requests the author to pay for the publication, in the range of $2000, plus about $1000 per colour picture. Therefore, Snooty Journal puts a footnote to the article stating that the article is legally a paid advertisement. The author is also signing the copyright over to Snooty Journal.
Due to the journal being compulsory for members of the Society of the given discipline (i.e. everyone in the field), it has the highest readership index, therefore, publishing in Snooty Journal is quasi prerequisitie for being taken seriously.
Now *that* is a business model and you don't even have to rage around to hunt for intellectual property thiev pirates and you don't have to pay a single cent for advertising the "artists".
"Terry's article also mentions that a recent Wellcome report found that an author-pays business model has the opportunity for a saving of 30 % on publishing costs alone compared to reader-pays."
Some papers take it to the ultimate level. The IOVS (and ophthalmology research paper, huge readership) figured out how to mix all models.
- The reader pays, subscription is compulsory if you are a member of the international society of ophthalmic research.
- The paper is full of advertisements
- It's peer revieved, revievers get nothing
- Authors pay for publication (and the paper puts a footnote for each article, indicating that since the author paid, the article legally is paid advertisement), colour pictures are extra.
- Authors also assign copyright to the paper (don't know the exact terms).
So, the best of all worlds: author, reader, advertiser - they all pay!
3: Profit!!!
the stuff that they will come up with and push through might make the Europeans to wake up.