That's an assertion that had some validity a few years ago, and has much less now. Yes, people tend to produce things similar to other popular things. But commercial software is no less that way than is GPL software. And guess what, people also tend to wear their hair the same way, and wear shoes that look in whatever style is popular.
That said, there is much free software is that explicitly designed to look NOTHING like commercial software. Anything that relies on the command line, for one thing. I would guess that more free software uses the command line than uses GUI, but it's a guess. Even more is purely a library, for use in building something else.
So I disagree with your point even for the relatively small subset of FOSS software that is directed at end users, though I do agree that the copying effect used to be rather dominant.
E.g., is "all electrons have the same charge" a law of nature? A matter of definition? True? False? It depends on how you are looking at them?
If nobody has called something a law of nature, does that mean that it isn't? What if only 3 people have called it such? Is it still a law of nature if it eventually turns out to be invalid? (Either in special cases, or because it's a special case of some other "law of nature".)
FWIW, legal terminology is generally a century behind the technical fields to which it refers, BECAUSE once the laws start using a term, the professionals stop using it, because the laws misapply and misdefine the term. It would be nice if the only reason for the errors were lack of understanding of the technicalities by those not of the profession, but there's usually a fair bit of evidence that it has been intentionally misinterpreted. This isn't surprising as legal cases are only made by someone with an ax to grind.
You can definitely *say* that mathematical truths will be the same in all universes, but you can't prove it. You can only prove that you can't imagine how it could be different. (Neither can I, but that's not proof.)
It is true that when I was actively studying mathematics, I also believe that math was a more underlying basic truth. I think this is a side effect of studying math intensively. Poets have been known to claim that the universe is poetry, e.g. "Truth is beauty. Beauty truth. That is all you know in life and all you need to know." I rather think that plumbers and hydralics engineers tend to see everything as flows. This says more about the nature of mind than about the nature of reality.
More to the point, those patents so infest the patent system as to call into question the desireability of even HAVING a patent system. They do so much damage that we might be better off without ANY patent system. In the area of software I'm rather sure that we would. Others, more knowledgeable in that area, seem to feel the same way about business methods patents.
I will agree with you in principle that there's no valid reason why patent shouldn't apply to a specific implementation, but guess what, that's what copyright covers.
The patent office became an absurdity when they stopped requiring detailed plans for construction as part of the patent. For software that would mean the source code. I do understand that they were running out of shelf space, but that's not a sufficient excuse. If patents are so important, then they should have just built a new storage area.
OTOH, if they implemented a test that the instructions in the patent should be detailed enough that one skilled in the art could reproduce the invention, then many of my comments would be invalidated, as long as the patent was on the specified implementation rather than on any way of doing the same thing.
You left out eating pieces of barbed wire. One must be VERY careful when stringing the fence that no pieces get left around, or they are likely to be eaten.
So their "Can I eat it?" decision seems to revolve around capability rather than likely results.
The military is clearly about a lot more than oil, but its use over the last few decades has been heavily involved in maintaining the flow of oil. That this is an inappropriate use I will agree.
As for "world domination", the US is almost as self-centered as China. I'll agree that "world domination" isn't what it's about. What it's about is making anything we (i.e. the govt.) considers important come out in the way desired. This isn't totally unreasonable, but it doesn't even consider what is fair or equitable.
IIRC the Minnesota Vikings were from an area with a high percentage of Scandanavian populace. So it is a bad example. The owners and the players may or may not have been Scandanavian, but their fans largely were. And I would guess that originally so were the players, and quite possibly the owners.
Now I will agree that they were probably not the descendants of the original Vikings. Those are found in Britain, Ireland, Normandy, Sicily, and Constantinople (or whatever it's called now). The Minnesotans left Scandinavia over a century after the vikings had ceased sailing. But they are the cultural descendants of the culture that spawned the vikings.
In this case I think it's people going: Now let's see...if I was setting up that kind of a service, how could I avoid that problem.
Mind you. your comment about hindsight was dead accurate, but I don't think it's exactly "blame the victim", more "How could I avoid being the next victim?".
Nuclear is still HEAVILY subsidized. One of the major subsidies idemnifies the operators from damages if a plant fails and spews radioactives over the neighborhood. No private insurance group or conglomerate of such groups was willing to offer that insurance at any price.
Whether this is reasonable or not is disputable. It is clearly a subsidy, however. And so is destabilizing foreign governments to keep the oil flowing.
Depends on your use case. Parabolic reflectors need sun tracking mirrors, so they make more sense on larger installations.
As always, the real problem is storage, which the power companies that supply electricity to areas that have lots of solar power installation know to their grief. And which this approach isn't dealing with. There are answers, but they involve lots of new construction, which is expensive. (Flow batteries, water towers, etc. Even compressed air. Some places are lucky and have large underground caverns with sealed access. They can use air pressure to store power, which can amplify the efficiency of gas turbines remarkably. For some reason this is a lot better than using pressurised air directly.)
I don't think you understand his argument. It is a reasonable argument, and plausible, if one-sided. It's as reasonable to measure the cost in ergs as in dollars. In fact ergs is probably more reasonable.
What he's doing is converting the costs in time, capital investment, and labor into a measure of energy instead of into dollars. One is as reasonable as the other for the conversion step, and you can't add them together until you have a common unit as a base.
I can't conceive of an argument against his point of view which isn't also an argument against using dollars as a measure. And for some of the steps the mapping to ergs is much more straightforwards.
Now if you want to argue that no common base unit is possible, that would be reasonable. It's certainly true that every attempt to use a common base unit introduces biases that ignore many features that aren't mappable to the base unit. Enjoyment, e.g. So it's quite correct to claim that it's an oversimplification. But it's one that EVERY economist uses, and most other people use. People say they earn so much/hour or month or year, but they don't tell you how much of the time they were bored, whether they liked spending time that way, etc. They don't usually even track it.
I suspect that efficiency is important to Musk. This is probably tied into his "people living on Mars" project, so he'd want light, low-cost, efficient solar cells for power. Since they are already projecting 24% efficiency within a couple of years he might get it up to 28% or 30% by the time he's packing the ships to go. I bet he's also looking into 3-D printers that do semiconductors, or at least circuit boards. (I think that circuit board printers already exist, and semiconductors may be a step too far.)
I'll have to admit that I don't consider a self-sustaining colony on Mars within 20 years to be do-able. There are too many unsolved problems, and several unknown details about the environment. But long-term habitation on Mars within 12 years is certainly a worthwhile goal. It could drive LOTS of technology projects, even if it's a total failure. And if it isn't...
Next didn't even EXIST then. You've got your timeline all screwed up.
And when the Next OS *was* built it was a Steve Jobs project. He brought it with him when he came back to Apple, so even so I'm having a hard time swallowing your indignation at crediting it to Apple. Apple now contains Next (or vice versa).
I've got no idea (or interest) in who did an MP3 player first. That was really out of thin air, though I *guess* it was an innovation, at least from the consumer point of view, if not from mine.
I do agree with you about the "slide to unlock". That's of a piece with "round cornered rectangles" (and others).
I think the difference between us is that you are focused on the recent Apple, and don't remember the old one. It has clearly become much closer to the company that you perceive over the last 5-10 years. And it was never perfect. Apple was always in favor of a walled garden, to the extent that for a while I considered MS to be preferable.
Sorry, but physical provision of wired services is a natural monopoly. I generally prefer that governments control natural monopolies. They *will* abuse it, but they already have a monopoly on the use of force, and any private party will also become an abusive monopoly, however they start out.
I'd really rather not have ANY monopolies, but that's just not practical. So one that is at least influenced by the voters is preferable. And that means government. Preferably as local as possible, so that if you really don't like the local environment you can hope to move to someplace better.
There's a good chance you are correct, but don't wrap your life around it. This is evidence based on mice, and people are significantly different. Many things that work on mice don't work on people.
Also, it's not certain that it would have precisely the effect that you are hoping for. It *might*.
That said, check out the side effects of suramin, and *if* they aren't too bad you might see if you can get a doctor to prescribe some for "off label" use. Your insurance probably won't pay, but the patents have probably expired, so it might well be cheap enough to afford.
Pizza (of a sort) was invented in Palestine when the Roman soldiers couldn't get levened bread during Passover. Granted, it wasn't much like the modern pizza.
Perhaps the modern pizza was invented in Chicago. Certainly one variety has that name.
Hmmmnf. In order to properly obey this law they need to put data centers in Canada that maintain a global index for use by the Canadian Google (google.ca?). Then they could properly remove the site from their global index...for google.ca.
If they just remove the entry from google.ca entries that are kept in another country, the legal precedent if bad.
The best solution would be for Google to spin off separate shell corporations for each country in which it does business, and equip them with the computers that run Google within that country. Then each national sub-Google would be bound with obeying the laws of that particular country.
Sorry, but historically Apple has been very innovative. It's true that they aren't usually the originator of the idea, but they usually realized its value before anyone else, and put in LOTS of work developing it. That was worthy of respect. They pretty much created the GUI interface, even though even MS has a sort of clunky one, and Xerox had a good one that was just to compute intensive to use. The trip from Xerox Star to Apple Lisa to Apple Macintosh took a great deal of work, careful research, and is well worthy of respect.
That, however, doesn't excuse a patent on round cornered rectangles.
Historically, Apple has been no where near as bad as MS. Recently, however, the gap has narrowed, and not by MS improving.
OTOH, Apple has usually sued over actual features...though "round cornered rectangles" rather takes the cake in stupidly approved patents, even for a design patent. I was never sure whether or not they should have won the suit against Lotus.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is, we're in the same pot of soup.
That's an assertion that had some validity a few years ago, and has much less now. Yes, people tend to produce things similar to other popular things. But commercial software is no less that way than is GPL software. And guess what, people also tend to wear their hair the same way, and wear shoes that look in whatever style is popular.
That said, there is much free software is that explicitly designed to look NOTHING like commercial software. Anything that relies on the command line, for one thing. I would guess that more free software uses the command line than uses GUI, but it's a guess. Even more is purely a library, for use in building something else.
So I disagree with your point even for the relatively small subset of FOSS software that is directed at end users, though I do agree that the copying effect used to be rather dominant.
I've heard of at least one. I don't know whether it was invalidated, but it came up in court and was mentioned in slashdot.
OTOH, given the accuracy of /. summaries, perhaps I should amend that to "I've heard an assertion of at least one".
But "laws of nature" is not a well defined term.
E.g., is "all electrons have the same charge" a law of nature? A matter of definition? True? False? It depends on how you are looking at them?
If nobody has called something a law of nature, does that mean that it isn't? What if only 3 people have called it such? Is it still a law of nature if it eventually turns out to be invalid? (Either in special cases, or because it's a special case of some other "law of nature".)
FWIW, legal terminology is generally a century behind the technical fields to which it refers, BECAUSE once the laws start using a term, the professionals stop using it, because the laws misapply and misdefine the term. It would be nice if the only reason for the errors were lack of understanding of the technicalities by those not of the profession, but there's usually a fair bit of evidence that it has been intentionally misinterpreted. This isn't surprising as legal cases are only made by someone with an ax to grind.
You can definitely *say* that mathematical truths will be the same in all universes, but you can't prove it. You can only prove that you can't imagine how it could be different. (Neither can I, but that's not proof.)
It is true that when I was actively studying mathematics, I also believe that math was a more underlying basic truth. I think this is a side effect of studying math intensively. Poets have been known to claim that the universe is poetry, e.g. "Truth is beauty. Beauty truth. That is all you know in life and all you need to know." I rather think that plumbers and hydralics engineers tend to see everything as flows. This says more about the nature of mind than about the nature of reality.
More to the point, those patents so infest the patent system as to call into question the desireability of even HAVING a patent system. They do so much damage that we might be better off without ANY patent system. In the area of software I'm rather sure that we would. Others, more knowledgeable in that area, seem to feel the same way about business methods patents.
I will agree with you in principle that there's no valid reason why patent shouldn't apply to a specific implementation, but guess what, that's what copyright covers.
The patent office became an absurdity when they stopped requiring detailed plans for construction as part of the patent. For software that would mean the source code. I do understand that they were running out of shelf space, but that's not a sufficient excuse. If patents are so important, then they should have just built a new storage area.
OTOH, if they implemented a test that the instructions in the patent should be detailed enough that one skilled in the art could reproduce the invention, then many of my comments would be invalidated, as long as the patent was on the specified implementation rather than on any way of doing the same thing.
You left out eating pieces of barbed wire. One must be VERY careful when stringing the fence that no pieces get left around, or they are likely to be eaten.
So their "Can I eat it?" decision seems to revolve around capability rather than likely results.
The military is clearly about a lot more than oil, but its use over the last few decades has been heavily involved in maintaining the flow of oil. That this is an inappropriate use I will agree.
As for "world domination", the US is almost as self-centered as China. I'll agree that "world domination" isn't what it's about. What it's about is making anything we (i.e. the govt.) considers important come out in the way desired. This isn't totally unreasonable, but it doesn't even consider what is fair or equitable.
What the company can do is have their lawyers tie the case up in enough paperwork to bankrupt you, or even a small city.
IIRC the Minnesota Vikings were from an area with a high percentage of Scandanavian populace. So it is a bad example. The owners and the players may or may not have been Scandanavian, but their fans largely were. And I would guess that originally so were the players, and quite possibly the owners.
Now I will agree that they were probably not the descendants of the original Vikings. Those are found in Britain, Ireland, Normandy, Sicily, and Constantinople (or whatever it's called now). The Minnesotans left Scandinavia over a century after the vikings had ceased sailing. But they are the cultural descendants of the culture that spawned the vikings.
Threat analysis is based on what you think a potential adversary could do, not on what you expect them to do, or what you think they would like to do.
Are they seriously worried? I doubt it. Are they planning for the eventuality? Bet on it.
In this case I think it's people going:
Now let's see...if I was setting up that kind of a service, how could I avoid that problem.
Mind you. your comment about hindsight was dead accurate, but I don't think it's exactly "blame the victim", more "How could I avoid being the next victim?".
Nuclear is still HEAVILY subsidized. One of the major subsidies idemnifies the operators from damages if a plant fails and spews radioactives over the neighborhood. No private insurance group or conglomerate of such groups was willing to offer that insurance at any price.
Whether this is reasonable or not is disputable. It is clearly a subsidy, however. And so is destabilizing foreign governments to keep the oil flowing.
Depends on your use case. Parabolic reflectors need sun tracking mirrors, so they make more sense on larger installations.
As always, the real problem is storage, which the power companies that supply electricity to areas that have lots of solar power installation know to their grief. And which this approach isn't dealing with. There are answers, but they involve lots of new construction, which is expensive. (Flow batteries, water towers, etc. Even compressed air. Some places are lucky and have large underground caverns with sealed access. They can use air pressure to store power, which can amplify the efficiency of gas turbines remarkably. For some reason this is a lot better than using pressurised air directly.)
There's some people who live downstream from a mountain top that just, oops, ended up in the river who might disagree with you.
An individual, or even a small group of individuals, doesn't have much recourse when a big company tells them to "like it or lump it".
Since you already (in most cases) need to convert from DC to AC, stepping up the voltage isn't a real problem.
I don't think you understand his argument. It is a reasonable argument, and plausible, if one-sided. It's as reasonable to measure the cost in ergs as in dollars. In fact ergs is probably more reasonable.
What he's doing is converting the costs in time, capital investment, and labor into a measure of energy instead of into dollars. One is as reasonable as the other for the conversion step, and you can't add them together until you have a common unit as a base.
I can't conceive of an argument against his point of view which isn't also an argument against using dollars as a measure. And for some of the steps the mapping to ergs is much more straightforwards.
Now if you want to argue that no common base unit is possible, that would be reasonable. It's certainly true that every attempt to use a common base unit introduces biases that ignore many features that aren't mappable to the base unit. Enjoyment, e.g. So it's quite correct to claim that it's an oversimplification. But it's one that EVERY economist uses, and most other people use. People say they earn so much/hour or month or year, but they don't tell you how much of the time they were bored, whether they liked spending time that way, etc. They don't usually even track it.
I suspect that efficiency is important to Musk. This is probably tied into his "people living on Mars" project, so he'd want light, low-cost, efficient solar cells for power. Since they are already projecting 24% efficiency within a couple of years he might get it up to 28% or 30% by the time he's packing the ships to go. I bet he's also looking into 3-D printers that do semiconductors, or at least circuit boards. (I think that circuit board printers already exist, and semiconductors may be a step too far.)
I'll have to admit that I don't consider a self-sustaining colony on Mars within 20 years to be do-able. There are too many unsolved problems, and several unknown details about the environment. But long-term habitation on Mars within 12 years is certainly a worthwhile goal. It could drive LOTS of technology projects, even if it's a total failure. And if it isn't...
Next didn't even EXIST then. You've got your timeline all screwed up.
And when the Next OS *was* built it was a Steve Jobs project. He brought it with him when he came back to Apple, so even so I'm having a hard time swallowing your indignation at crediting it to Apple. Apple now contains Next (or vice versa).
I've got no idea (or interest) in who did an MP3 player first. That was really out of thin air, though I *guess* it was an innovation, at least from the consumer point of view, if not from mine.
I do agree with you about the "slide to unlock". That's of a piece with "round cornered rectangles" (and others).
I think the difference between us is that you are focused on the recent Apple, and don't remember the old one. It has clearly become much closer to the company that you perceive over the last 5-10 years. And it was never perfect. Apple was always in favor of a walled garden, to the extent that for a while I considered MS to be preferable.
Sorry, but physical provision of wired services is a natural monopoly. I generally prefer that governments control natural monopolies. They *will* abuse it, but they already have a monopoly on the use of force, and any private party will also become an abusive monopoly, however they start out.
I'd really rather not have ANY monopolies, but that's just not practical. So one that is at least influenced by the voters is preferable. And that means government. Preferably as local as possible, so that if you really don't like the local environment you can hope to move to someplace better.
There's a good chance you are correct, but don't wrap your life around it. This is evidence based on mice, and people are significantly different. Many things that work on mice don't work on people.
Also, it's not certain that it would have precisely the effect that you are hoping for. It *might*.
That said, check out the side effects of suramin, and *if* they aren't too bad you might see if you can get a doctor to prescribe some for "off label" use. Your insurance probably won't pay, but the patents have probably expired, so it might well be cheap enough to afford.
Pizza (of a sort) was invented in Palestine when the Roman soldiers couldn't get levened bread during Passover. Granted, it wasn't much like the modern pizza.
Perhaps the modern pizza was invented in Chicago. Certainly one variety has that name.
Hmmmnf. In order to properly obey this law they need to put data centers in Canada that maintain a global index for use by the Canadian Google (google.ca?). Then they could properly remove the site from their global index...for google.ca.
If they just remove the entry from google.ca entries that are kept in another country, the legal precedent if bad.
The best solution would be for Google to spin off separate shell corporations for each country in which it does business, and equip them with the computers that run Google within that country. Then each national sub-Google would be bound with obeying the laws of that particular country.
Sorry, but historically Apple has been very innovative. It's true that they aren't usually the originator of the idea, but they usually realized its value before anyone else, and put in LOTS of work developing it. That was worthy of respect. They pretty much created the GUI interface, even though even MS has a sort of clunky one, and Xerox had a good one that was just to compute intensive to use. The trip from Xerox Star to Apple Lisa to Apple Macintosh took a great deal of work, careful research, and is well worthy of respect.
That, however, doesn't excuse a patent on round cornered rectangles.
Historically, Apple has been no where near as bad as MS. Recently, however, the gap has narrowed, and not by MS improving.
OTOH, Apple has usually sued over actual features...though "round cornered rectangles" rather takes the cake in stupidly approved patents, even for a design patent. I was never sure whether or not they should have won the suit against Lotus.