This is far from proof. But I would not really be surprised, just at an intuitive level, if Hawking radiation can be found at ANY type of horizon. Hawking radiation itself was predicted by a post-doc whose name I forget, promptly forgotten for several years, then it was picked up and championed by Hawking. Hawking himself wasn't the one who made the original connection between entropy and certain horizon equations, although he did start the process in motion with a proof that the area of the event horizon cannot decrease.
It sounded incredibly far-fetched at the time -- just because the equations look similar can't possibly mean there is radiation, can it? And yet it was true. I'm not surprised at all. Anywhere you have a horizon and also a law which prevents that horizon's area from decreasing with time, you are probably going to see black body radiation.
"Hey that's not right! They were only stealing money from the creators!"
The creator of Scrabble is dead. At this point it is only "stealing" from a large corporation whose only concern is money making. Is it legal? No. But I consider it quite a bit less ethically broken than if Mr. Butts (yes, that's his name) was still alive and actively profiting from his creation.
Are you suggesting that, in the case that there is other life out there, that they won't come up with the same mathematical system that we have? Of course not.
That conclusion is unjustified. A physical being which is incapable of distinguishing "numbers" is obviously not going to have any sort of mathematics, or logic for that matter, even remotely close to ours. If you think math is obviously universal, you clearly haven't taken hallucinogens before.
Whether it's abiding by the GPL or not, somebody else is making money from your creation.
This is a stupid, juvenile concern. If it offended me that others would use my code, I would not release it. The only purpose of releasing code under GPL or any other communist license is personal gratification and egotism.
It always amazes me how applicable math becomes hundreds of years after it's written. Think if Maxwell's equations, Newton's equations, Einstein's equations. Fluid Dynamics equations were probably pioneered well before they were applied to human machines. Modern-day aircraft would not operate without their understanding. Where the math goes, human technology will probably soon follow.
It's often debated whether mathematics is invented or discovered. I think the question is irrelevant. Mathematics is clearly a human endeavor. Whether it has some deeper meaning outside of human existence is not something we can even address, seeing as we can never step outside our human condition. But it is indisputable that mathematics has allowed us to move far beyond the boundaries of any other physical organism that we yet know of. Whether it's "real" or not, it is certainly real in the context of our own existence. The philosophical arguments between mathematicians and physicists are petty at best. Ultimately, all new math seems to find application in the physical world. We should not be surprised, given that we are physical beings.
I feel pride, not in humanity, but in the universe itself, that it has the capacity to create physical beings which are capable of comprehension, at least at a basic level, of the true nature of reality. It may be colored by our nature, but the triumphs of modern science, in particular nuclear energy, show that we may actually be aware of some fundamental truth. The law of mass-energy equivalence can be demonstrated through purely geometric arguments -- you need not even understand calculus in order to grasp the math. We have grasped the power of stars. That proves something about us, but I am not sure what.
Why waste time keeping track of all the crap that should NOT be on the machine, and instead track what SHOULD be? Anything that's not on the list, can't execute. Period. When running a new program for the first time, this would simply require a single confirmation click.
But had that prior art been patented, then it would not have been considered obvious. So we have a situation where obviousness is determined by the filing of arbitrary paperwork, which makes no sense.
You fail to account for the psychological pleasure gained by relaxing in a chair as you watch a line of serfs stream past you and pack like sardines into the lower class area. I have never flown first class, but I have been smirked at gloatingly by many a first class passenger. I don't think they'd give up that little treat.
I have no problem with a government agency creating regulations in order to promulgate a law passed by Congress. The alternative? Congress becomes more of a bureaucratic red tape monstrosity than it already is. The truth is that these agencies more often than not are very familiar with the topic area and are better equipped at enforcing the law passed by Congress. Now agencies are not allowed to create laws, only create regulations that promote the laws passed by Congress.
I suppose my objection is technical in nature. I take no issue with legislation being drafted by basically anyone, including a government agency. But in order for anything to be a law in the sense that one could be punished for violating it, I would always want to see that Congress had signed off on it. Yes, every single one of them. If they don't want to waste their time reading everything, I'd even be okay with that, too. At least they can be held accountable to the voters for their signatures.
I have never had to deal with government regulations. Can one be punished with a specific punishment for violation of a specific regulation? Or must there be a violation of a legislated law in order for there to be a punishment? In other words, are the regulations merely acting as instruments which ultimately lead to actual law, or do they have force of their own?
When thousands of dollars (or more) are being lost every minute that a service is unavailable[0], you don't fuck around with idiotic philosophising about how "its UNIX, I shouldn't need to reboot for anything"[1], you just DO IT.
I wasn't "philosophizing," it simply did not occur to me. As evidenced by the fact that as soon as the "fix" was suggested, we tried it, and it worked.
And let me give you an example. You know those people who don't follow the "rules" of the IRS but find themselves in court and paying large fines? I'm sure they had the same attitude you did before they ended up in that situation.
Please don't envision me as some kind of Ruby Ridge fanatic, because I am not, but doesn't this state of affairs disturb you at all? Is it really legal for Congress to confer legislative rights onto other bodies? That these bodies can create and enforce "legislation" that has not been vetted by a Congressional vote? I don't believe it is Constitutional for the legislature to confer its powers to any other body, since that other body is not elected. Am I wrong on this? If so, my faith in the underpinnings of the federal government is shattered, and I do not exaggerate.
It may not be obvious to a non-technical judge or jury, however, even today.
Which is really the core of the whole issue, isn't it? Obvious TO WHOM? Under patent law, that "whom" is "a person skilled in the art." In other words, a techie. Now, a lot of techies are vile, petty, competitive creatures with a great disdain for humanity as a whole. For reference, see Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org/). Of course we are going to find numerous tech professionals who will claim that any damn thing under the Sun is "obvious" just because of ego.
The root of the patent issue is in determining who, out of the millions employed in the tech sector, qualifies as a person "skilled in the art." Everybody thinks they are skilled. Few actually are. But there is a great social incentive to pretend that one is skilled, even if one is not, that surpasses such tendencies in almost any other field except the hard sciences. Nobody that I know of is ashamed of being only a "mediocre" car mechanic, for instance. Most people understand that the majority of individuals are "average." Except, of course, in the tech field, where we all believe ourselves to be geniuses.
Just did a report about business patents. Non-obviousness, a requirement of Patents (35 USC 102?), isn't proven by looking at something and saying "Duh!" You need to show prior art preferably enough prior art examples to cover all of Akamai's claims.
I'm not sure that I understand you properly. You are saying that if you can find prior art, this proves obviousness. In other words, the fact that somebody thought of it, makes it obvious, i.e., all things are obvious. Since this is clearly not what you mean, could you please clarify?
The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology can provide. People don't have time to know, understand, or research history and find that technology really can be reliable.
I am not an idiot. I know that five nines is possible. I do not care to pay the price required for it. If you think this makes me an idiot, then you must be in high school buying things with dad's credit card.
The parent post should be modded up. It is a valid insight which the submitter obviously fails to grasp. 99.999% uptime (the number being tossed around in the discussions here, not the article title) works out to just a little over 5 minutes of downtime per year. Unless you are able to switch providers in under 5 minutes, then the very act of switching providers will guarantee that you have less than 99.999% uptime. It simply isn't mathematically possible.
That being said, there is a market for 99.999. Upper-middle class and higher would pay for it.
That's nuts. The upper-middle class got that way not by being a bunch of morons. Do I, as a home user, think it's worth it to spend 10x as much cash in order to get a few minutes less downtime? God, the horror of having to suffer for 5 minutes without Slashdot just makes me want to go slit my wrists right now.
I can't believe the depth of delusion sometimes. Are you people all in high school? Are you locked in a padded cell somewhere? Wait, don't answer that.
t's not that customers will put up with it, it's that there are exactly zero providers willing to offer such a service. When every single vendor will simply tell the customer to go screw, what option is there?
Paranoid much? There are so many providers than collusion on this level would be impossible. If there was a significant demand for such a level of service, do you seriously think that capitalists would pass up the opportunity to profit from it? No, the reality is that there is no demand, or at least no demand at a level which would make the operation profitable. So you have a small amount of crazy people berating the rest of us for being "stupid" when it is just simple economics. Am I too stupid to realize what 99.999% uptime is? No, I simply don't give a shit.
It's funny the attitude that comes from the users of each OS. Windows administrators categorically will try rebooting the damn thing first to fix any problem (and it usually works). Linux administrators will only try this as a last resort (and it almost never works).
It's even less than a last resort. I have, once or twice, had true problems that required a reboot of a Linux machine to fix. The one in most recent memory, it took three weeks before realizing that a reboot was (or at least, could be) the solution. That's three weeks of hard core debugging, tweaking, and hair pulling. The idea of a reboot to fix a user-level software issue is not something that even remotely crossed my mind, nor anyone else's. In fact, it was a Windows user from another location who ultimately made the suggestion "Have you tried rebooting it?"
Rebooting a computer to fix a problem should be viewed with the same suspicion as burning down your house to eradicate an infestation of insects.
I don't know what state you live in, but around here, we follow laws, not rules. The DHS can make whatever damn fucking "rules" they want to make. I don't really care too much. If it wasn't pass by a federal or state Congress and then signed into legislation by either a federal or state executive officer, you sure a hell will not see me adhering to such "rules."
But the amount of healthcare provided can be a spectrum, not all or nothing. I believe that for a nation to call itself a civilization, certain things must be assured to its population. Food, as in your example, is one of those things. Another is that a person will not die from a preventable cause when there is a treatment or some other form of action available. A country which allows its citizens to die needlessly is not a civilization.
This is not the same as doing everything possible. But citizens physically falling down dead when the technology exists to prevent this, should be a source of national shame and embarrassment.
Let's see: egotism, staunchness, refusal to yield, divisiveness, superiority, rampant ideological ranting... None of those are human qualities at all, no sir.
Slashdot Mirror
This is far from proof. But I would not really be surprised, just at an intuitive level, if Hawking radiation can be found at ANY type of horizon. Hawking radiation itself was predicted by a post-doc whose name I forget, promptly forgotten for several years, then it was picked up and championed by Hawking. Hawking himself wasn't the one who made the original connection between entropy and certain horizon equations, although he did start the process in motion with a proof that the area of the event horizon cannot decrease.
It sounded incredibly far-fetched at the time -- just because the equations look similar can't possibly mean there is radiation, can it? And yet it was true. I'm not surprised at all. Anywhere you have a horizon and also a law which prevents that horizon's area from decreasing with time, you are probably going to see black body radiation.
Thank God the kernel is GPL. I can go in there and remove all this stupid GPLONLY garbage.
"Hey that's not right! They were only stealing money from the creators!"
The creator of Scrabble is dead. At this point it is only "stealing" from a large corporation whose only concern is money making. Is it legal? No. But I consider it quite a bit less ethically broken than if Mr. Butts (yes, that's his name) was still alive and actively profiting from his creation.
Are you suggesting that, in the case that there is other life out there, that they won't come up with the same mathematical system that we have? Of course not.
That conclusion is unjustified. A physical being which is incapable of distinguishing "numbers" is obviously not going to have any sort of mathematics, or logic for that matter, even remotely close to ours. If you think math is obviously universal, you clearly haven't taken hallucinogens before.
Whether it's abiding by the GPL or not, somebody else is making money from your creation.
This is a stupid, juvenile concern. If it offended me that others would use my code, I would not release it. The only purpose of releasing code under GPL or any other communist license is personal gratification and egotism.
It always amazes me how applicable math becomes hundreds of years after it's written. Think if Maxwell's equations, Newton's equations, Einstein's equations. Fluid Dynamics equations were probably pioneered well before they were applied to human machines. Modern-day aircraft would not operate without their understanding. Where the math goes, human technology will probably soon follow.
It's often debated whether mathematics is invented or discovered. I think the question is irrelevant. Mathematics is clearly a human endeavor. Whether it has some deeper meaning outside of human existence is not something we can even address, seeing as we can never step outside our human condition. But it is indisputable that mathematics has allowed us to move far beyond the boundaries of any other physical organism that we yet know of. Whether it's "real" or not, it is certainly real in the context of our own existence. The philosophical arguments between mathematicians and physicists are petty at best. Ultimately, all new math seems to find application in the physical world. We should not be surprised, given that we are physical beings.
I feel pride, not in humanity, but in the universe itself, that it has the capacity to create physical beings which are capable of comprehension, at least at a basic level, of the true nature of reality. It may be colored by our nature, but the triumphs of modern science, in particular nuclear energy, show that we may actually be aware of some fundamental truth. The law of mass-energy equivalence can be demonstrated through purely geometric arguments -- you need not even understand calculus in order to grasp the math. We have grasped the power of stars. That proves something about us, but I am not sure what.
Why waste time keeping track of all the crap that should NOT be on the machine, and instead track what SHOULD be? Anything that's not on the list, can't execute. Period. When running a new program for the first time, this would simply require a single confirmation click.
But had that prior art been patented, then it would not have been considered obvious. So we have a situation where obviousness is determined by the filing of arbitrary paperwork, which makes no sense.
You fail to account for the psychological pleasure gained by relaxing in a chair as you watch a line of serfs stream past you and pack like sardines into the lower class area. I have never flown first class, but I have been smirked at gloatingly by many a first class passenger. I don't think they'd give up that little treat.
I have no problem with a government agency creating regulations in order to promulgate a law passed by Congress. The alternative? Congress becomes more of a bureaucratic red tape monstrosity than it already is. The truth is that these agencies more often than not are very familiar with the topic area and are better equipped at enforcing the law passed by Congress. Now agencies are not allowed to create laws, only create regulations that promote the laws passed by Congress.
I suppose my objection is technical in nature. I take no issue with legislation being drafted by basically anyone, including a government agency. But in order for anything to be a law in the sense that one could be punished for violating it, I would always want to see that Congress had signed off on it. Yes, every single one of them. If they don't want to waste their time reading everything, I'd even be okay with that, too. At least they can be held accountable to the voters for their signatures.
I have never had to deal with government regulations. Can one be punished with a specific punishment for violation of a specific regulation? Or must there be a violation of a legislated law in order for there to be a punishment? In other words, are the regulations merely acting as instruments which ultimately lead to actual law, or do they have force of their own?
When thousands of dollars (or more) are being lost every minute that a service is unavailable[0], you don't fuck around with idiotic philosophising about how "its UNIX, I shouldn't need to reboot for anything"[1], you just DO IT.
I wasn't "philosophizing," it simply did not occur to me. As evidenced by the fact that as soon as the "fix" was suggested, we tried it, and it worked.And let me give you an example. You know those people who don't follow the "rules" of the IRS but find themselves in court and paying large fines? I'm sure they had the same attitude you did before they ended up in that situation.
Please don't envision me as some kind of Ruby Ridge fanatic, because I am not, but doesn't this state of affairs disturb you at all? Is it really legal for Congress to confer legislative rights onto other bodies? That these bodies can create and enforce "legislation" that has not been vetted by a Congressional vote? I don't believe it is Constitutional for the legislature to confer its powers to any other body, since that other body is not elected. Am I wrong on this? If so, my faith in the underpinnings of the federal government is shattered, and I do not exaggerate.
It may not be obvious to a non-technical judge or jury, however, even today.
Which is really the core of the whole issue, isn't it? Obvious TO WHOM? Under patent law, that "whom" is "a person skilled in the art." In other words, a techie. Now, a lot of techies are vile, petty, competitive creatures with a great disdain for humanity as a whole. For reference, see Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org/). Of course we are going to find numerous tech professionals who will claim that any damn thing under the Sun is "obvious" just because of ego.
The root of the patent issue is in determining who, out of the millions employed in the tech sector, qualifies as a person "skilled in the art." Everybody thinks they are skilled. Few actually are. But there is a great social incentive to pretend that one is skilled, even if one is not, that surpasses such tendencies in almost any other field except the hard sciences. Nobody that I know of is ashamed of being only a "mediocre" car mechanic, for instance. Most people understand that the majority of individuals are "average." Except, of course, in the tech field, where we all believe ourselves to be geniuses.
Just did a report about business patents. Non-obviousness, a requirement of Patents (35 USC 102?), isn't proven by looking at something and saying "Duh!" You need to show prior art preferably enough prior art examples to cover all of Akamai's claims.
I'm not sure that I understand you properly. You are saying that if you can find prior art, this proves obviousness. In other words, the fact that somebody thought of it, makes it obvious, i.e., all things are obvious. Since this is clearly not what you mean, could you please clarify?
Anybody can win an argument by changing the topic. You're talking about mobile phone providers. I'm talking about ISPs.
The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology can provide. People don't have time to know, understand, or research history and find that technology really can be reliable.
I am not an idiot. I know that five nines is possible. I do not care to pay the price required for it. If you think this makes me an idiot, then you must be in high school buying things with dad's credit card.
The parent post should be modded up. It is a valid insight which the submitter obviously fails to grasp. 99.999% uptime (the number being tossed around in the discussions here, not the article title) works out to just a little over 5 minutes of downtime per year. Unless you are able to switch providers in under 5 minutes, then the very act of switching providers will guarantee that you have less than 99.999% uptime. It simply isn't mathematically possible.
The house represents what is currently occurring on the system (presumably, critical things). Not the physical computer itself.
That being said, there is a market for 99.999. Upper-middle class and higher would pay for it.
That's nuts. The upper-middle class got that way not by being a bunch of morons. Do I, as a home user, think it's worth it to spend 10x as much cash in order to get a few minutes less downtime? God, the horror of having to suffer for 5 minutes without Slashdot just makes me want to go slit my wrists right now.
I can't believe the depth of delusion sometimes. Are you people all in high school? Are you locked in a padded cell somewhere? Wait, don't answer that.
t's not that customers will put up with it, it's that there are exactly zero providers willing to offer such a service. When every single vendor will simply tell the customer to go screw, what option is there?
Paranoid much? There are so many providers than collusion on this level would be impossible. If there was a significant demand for such a level of service, do you seriously think that capitalists would pass up the opportunity to profit from it? No, the reality is that there is no demand, or at least no demand at a level which would make the operation profitable. So you have a small amount of crazy people berating the rest of us for being "stupid" when it is just simple economics. Am I too stupid to realize what 99.999% uptime is? No, I simply don't give a shit.
It's funny the attitude that comes from the users of each OS. Windows administrators categorically will try rebooting the damn thing first to fix any problem (and it usually works). Linux administrators will only try this as a last resort (and it almost never works).
It's even less than a last resort. I have, once or twice, had true problems that required a reboot of a Linux machine to fix. The one in most recent memory, it took three weeks before realizing that a reboot was (or at least, could be) the solution. That's three weeks of hard core debugging, tweaking, and hair pulling. The idea of a reboot to fix a user-level software issue is not something that even remotely crossed my mind, nor anyone else's. In fact, it was a Windows user from another location who ultimately made the suggestion "Have you tried rebooting it?"
Rebooting a computer to fix a problem should be viewed with the same suspicion as burning down your house to eradicate an infestation of insects.
I don't know what state you live in, but around here, we follow laws, not rules. The DHS can make whatever damn fucking "rules" they want to make. I don't really care too much. If it wasn't pass by a federal or state Congress and then signed into legislation by either a federal or state executive officer, you sure a hell will not see me adhering to such "rules."
I first read that headline as, "IBM Optical Chip Zaps Huge Flies." How disappointing.
But the amount of healthcare provided can be a spectrum, not all or nothing. I believe that for a nation to call itself a civilization, certain things must be assured to its population. Food, as in your example, is one of those things. Another is that a person will not die from a preventable cause when there is a treatment or some other form of action available. A country which allows its citizens to die needlessly is not a civilization.
This is not the same as doing everything possible. But citizens physically falling down dead when the technology exists to prevent this, should be a source of national shame and embarrassment.
Let's see: egotism, staunchness, refusal to yield, divisiveness, superiority, rampant ideological ranting... None of those are human qualities at all, no sir.