Possibly; however, if it ever came down to an all-out litigious patent war, AMD may well have come out on top thanks to holding the rights to the x86-64 instruction set. It's not clear that AMD gets any real benefit other than getting to put the whole dispute behind them. I suspect that the real advantage that AMD gets out of this is the admission from Intel that they were engaging in illegal business practices. Intel has agreed to stop blocking AMD from OEM sales and will probably honor it considering that they've just admitted to bad behavior.
It looks to me like AMD thinks that they can compete based on their products despite the disadvantage that Intel has put them in through illegal means. I just hope that it means we get to see some chips from AMD that once again provide a much better performance/cost ratio than the Intel chips.
Apple has a lot of good ideas that Windows and Linux copy. Likewise, Windows and Linux generate a lot of good ideas that the other two copy. It's not surprising that Windows is mimicking some OSX features (and it obviously is). It would just be nice if Microsoft and Apple stopped getting patents on every damned thing (sudo) and acknowledged that other can have good ideas. Personally, I think Windows would do better to take pages from the KDE book, but maybe that's just personal taste.
Yeah, but is that really a sufficient leap away from sudo to justify a patent? Most mainstream Linux distros already provide a graphical dialog box for sudo privileges, Windows already provides administrator authentication pop-ups; surely the idea of displaying different possible user accounts isn't worth a patent.
Exactly, a site and set of trackers dedicated to legal material will facilitate the argument that there are, in fact, legal uses for torrents. This fact is utterly lost on many legislators thanks to the lobbying of Big Content. They need all the help they can get to see beyond the lobbyists and this is a step in the right direction. If the LegalTorrents community can demonstrate that a community can self-regulate to avoid infringement it will make the arguments of the RIAA more transparently false.
Big Content will eventually die off simply because they aren't needed anymore. Artists no longer need big labels to publish their content and the more tools that artists have to avoid Big Content the better.
Oh, and Quebec was isolated from the rest of the Eastern Interconnection...in 1990 because of its demonstrated repeated inability to stop cascading blackouts
Citation needed. The only information I could find suggested that the Quebec grid is isolated because it operates asynchronously with neighboring grids, not because it experienced a failure in 1989. According to Wikipedia, the main reason the Quebec grid is susceptible to failures is because the power stations are located far from the metropolitan areas out of geographic necessity.
I think all hijacked botnets should be made to run BOINC distributed computing projects. The users who can't keep their machines secure and contribute a huge volume of spam to the internet should be sentenced to community service. In form of having their machines dedicate most clock cycles to the advancement of esoteric scientific pursuits.
Right...because the botnet was measured to be producing precisely 1/3 of the world's spam. I suspect that the original estimate was sufficiently inaccurate that more than one significant figure would not really be justified, let alone an exact value.
If you point a LIDAR at a multifactaed object (like say a staionary car) and the operator moves enough to bounce the lazer from the grill to the windshield. A LIDAR will have seen the car 'move' because the distance the lazer went changed.
It would depend entirely on the integration time of the measurement. If, during the time of measurement, your car moves a distance that is significant compared to the distance from the grill to the windshield then the impact on the result would be insignificant. Assuming a speed of 110km/h, a 1 m distance from the grill to the top of the windshield and a 1 second measurement integration time, the error would be 3%. Standard radar would have a similar uncertainty because of the long wavelength (the fact that it can't distinguish the difference between the grill and the top of the windshield doesn't make it more accurate, it makes it fundamentally inaccurate).
I live in Montreal, which I'd say is pretty close. I probably use heating for about about six months of the year and desperately wish I had AC for at least two months. That's plenty of summer for me! (I used to live in Calgary, which gets even less summer.)
You're handing control over to another driver, who may very well decide not to brake and cause a five car pileup
The following cars are electronically linked in, they would also brake and the whole train would come to a stop. As long as each car (including the lead) was restricted to brake at the same rate as the car with the worst stopping time no collision would ever occur. Besides, if the distance between the cars is small enough, even a discrepancy in braking power that wasn't compensated for would only cause a slight difference in velocity before a collision occurred. The impact would be minimal unless the last vehicle was a truck with failed brakes; but TFA states that trucks would be at the front.
At the end of the day, we all put our lives in the hands of every other driver on the road anyway. Same thing if you ever get on a bus. As long as the systems were reliable I doubt it would add too much extra danger.
Eventually we'll get reliable remote control from the highways themselves though and then travel will be *awesome.* I envision a system where traffic light controlled intersections are replaced by precision timing. Cars would be staggered by about two cars lengths as they approached the intersection and would be timed such that they could pass through the intersection at full speed without colliding. Of course, the drivers would have to be removed from the loop entirely and every vehicle would have to be completely reliable. If it did work though, could you imagine passing mere meters from other vehicles travelling perpendicular to your vehicle all at a couple hundred km/h? Of course by then we'll all have jet-packs anyway, right? Right?!?
TFA suggests that it would be held up by air pressure. That means that, not only do you have to worry about snow, but there's also the problem that if enough panels break to lower the interior pressure the dome could collapse. Or in a high-wind scenario the Bernoulli effect could burst it. You're also right that obviously the surface area of the dome would result in truly absurd heating costs and I suspect really terrible AC costs in the summer (greenhouse effect!); Vermont really does get a lot of summer.
I don't know if they're being developed but I suspect that we'll see TVs/monitors that are capable of producing differently polarized light for each eye. It's much better system since you don't get the awful color distortion of the blue/orange system. It seems to me that it would be fairly easy to do since LCD screens already operate by manipulating the polarization of light to tune the intensity of each pixel. One more liquid crystal layer and a quarter-waveplate would do it so the technology is clearly there.
What they really need to do is define a version numbering scheme that results in a series that converges to v1.0. At the end of time it will be within an epsilon-neighborhood of being usable by the general public.
A scam involves dishonesty. DRMed content is sold with full disclosure with regards to how the format is crippled. It's poorly thought out and a scourge on the legal purchasers of copies of content but it's not a scam. EULA's are scam, an example of bait-and-switch, but DRM just sucks.
Obviously not, I could use openDNS, but I still disagree with the practice. I also just like any opportunity to say "Fuck you Bell" for any number of reasons (net neutrality, anti-competitive practices, low transfer caps, terrible prices, patchy connectivity and a terrible modem).
wait for prices to drop if I don't value it at it's current price
That's exactly how it should work, that's the foundational principle of economics.
I will occasionally download pirated software. This is generally software or music that I really don't value or only need to use once, and really doesn't hold enough value to me to justify paying the full price.
If it's not worth the sale price to you, don't buy it. It doesn't give you the moral right to pirate it.
I pirate stuff all the time out of pure, immoral self-interest; I don't justify it or sugar coat it. I often even feel bad about it.
Artists, authors, musicians, developers, etc. are absolutely free to publish works in the public domain. They do so frequently and it's a wonderful thing. The public domain was not stolen from the public, it's alive and well and is an option for everyone wanting to share ideas with the public.
I have no love of Big Content; they're a scourge. I also think that producers of intellectual content have the right to choose to not release works in the public domain and I think that should be respected.
I think you certainly can own a copy of copyrighted work, that's the idea behind copyright. Publishers can try to convince me that it's a license to use the content and not a copy and I'll continue to smile and nod.
Thanks for the link, I've made it through three chapters already. I still think that the position is utterly indefensible but I have a much clearer idea of what I'm disagreeing with. (Copyright reform, absolutely, but I still think abolition is completely wrong.) The authors have seven more chapters to convince me but so far I disagree with most of their key arguments. Anyway, thanks for the resource.
No one is entitled to violate copyrights because they disagree with the business model. They are entitled to simple abstain from buying (and therefore owning) the content.
What product would that be? The World of Goo payment experiment effectively demonstrated that when consumers can choose how much they want to pay for a valuable product they, for the most part, to pay far less than it's worth. I don't think piracy comes down to a quality issue with the product.
Don't like copyrights? Fine, write to your government representative. Don't like the product? Don't watch it. Piracy is not a statement; it's transparently self-serving and to claim otherwise is to delude yourself.
Big Content has to change it's business model, not because it's ethically wrong, but because people simply aren't going to stop violating copyrights because they're cheap.
Now I'm not saying that think that copyright is perfect. It isn't and it needs a serious reform but that isn't an excuse to violate it for your own interests.
So I've noticed. The position seems completely indefensible to me; I don't understand how people could be expected to a living producing ideas under such a system. Could you point me towards some literature supporting the viewpoint? I'm genuinely curious.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly; however, if it ever came down to an all-out litigious patent war, AMD may well have come out on top thanks to holding the rights to the x86-64 instruction set. It's not clear that AMD gets any real benefit other than getting to put the whole dispute behind them. I suspect that the real advantage that AMD gets out of this is the admission from Intel that they were engaging in illegal business practices. Intel has agreed to stop blocking AMD from OEM sales and will probably honor it considering that they've just admitted to bad behavior.
It looks to me like AMD thinks that they can compete based on their products despite the disadvantage that Intel has put them in through illegal means. I just hope that it means we get to see some chips from AMD that once again provide a much better performance/cost ratio than the Intel chips.
Apple has a lot of good ideas that Windows and Linux copy. Likewise, Windows and Linux generate a lot of good ideas that the other two copy. It's not surprising that Windows is mimicking some OSX features (and it obviously is). It would just be nice if Microsoft and Apple stopped getting patents on every damned thing (sudo) and acknowledged that other can have good ideas. Personally, I think Windows would do better to take pages from the KDE book, but maybe that's just personal taste.
Yeah, but is that really a sufficient leap away from sudo to justify a patent? Most mainstream Linux distros already provide a graphical dialog box for sudo privileges, Windows already provides administrator authentication pop-ups; surely the idea of displaying different possible user accounts isn't worth a patent.
Exactly, a site and set of trackers dedicated to legal material will facilitate the argument that there are, in fact, legal uses for torrents. This fact is utterly lost on many legislators thanks to the lobbying of Big Content. They need all the help they can get to see beyond the lobbyists and this is a step in the right direction. If the LegalTorrents community can demonstrate that a community can self-regulate to avoid infringement it will make the arguments of the RIAA more transparently false.
Big Content will eventually die off simply because they aren't needed anymore. Artists no longer need big labels to publish their content and the more tools that artists have to avoid Big Content the better.
Oh, and Quebec was isolated from the rest of the Eastern Interconnection...in 1990 because of its demonstrated repeated inability to stop cascading blackouts
Citation needed. The only information I could find suggested that the Quebec grid is isolated because it operates asynchronously with neighboring grids, not because it experienced a failure in 1989. According to Wikipedia, the main reason the Quebec grid is susceptible to failures is because the power stations are located far from the metropolitan areas out of geographic necessity.
I think all hijacked botnets should be made to run BOINC distributed computing projects. The users who can't keep their machines secure and contribute a huge volume of spam to the internet should be sentenced to community service. In form of having their machines dedicate most clock cycles to the advancement of esoteric scientific pursuits.
Right...because the botnet was measured to be producing precisely 1/3 of the world's spam. I suspect that the original estimate was sufficiently inaccurate that more than one significant figure would not really be justified, let alone an exact value.
If you point a LIDAR at a multifactaed object (like say a staionary car) and the operator moves enough to bounce the lazer from the grill to the windshield. A LIDAR will have seen the car 'move' because the distance the lazer went changed.
It would depend entirely on the integration time of the measurement. If, during the time of measurement, your car moves a distance that is significant compared to the distance from the grill to the windshield then the impact on the result would be insignificant. Assuming a speed of 110km/h, a 1 m distance from the grill to the top of the windshield and a 1 second measurement integration time, the error would be 3%. Standard radar would have a similar uncertainty because of the long wavelength (the fact that it can't distinguish the difference between the grill and the top of the windshield doesn't make it more accurate, it makes it fundamentally inaccurate).
Also, it's laser, not lazer.
I use Linux
You may not be in their target audience.
Ah good point. Fuck you Bell Canada!
I live in Montreal, which I'd say is pretty close. I probably use heating for about about six months of the year and desperately wish I had AC for at least two months. That's plenty of summer for me! (I used to live in Calgary, which gets even less summer.)
You're handing control over to another driver, who may very well decide not to brake and cause a five car pileup
The following cars are electronically linked in, they would also brake and the whole train would come to a stop. As long as each car (including the lead) was restricted to brake at the same rate as the car with the worst stopping time no collision would ever occur. Besides, if the distance between the cars is small enough, even a discrepancy in braking power that wasn't compensated for would only cause a slight difference in velocity before a collision occurred. The impact would be minimal unless the last vehicle was a truck with failed brakes; but TFA states that trucks would be at the front.
At the end of the day, we all put our lives in the hands of every other driver on the road anyway. Same thing if you ever get on a bus. As long as the systems were reliable I doubt it would add too much extra danger.
Eventually we'll get reliable remote control from the highways themselves though and then travel will be *awesome.* I envision a system where traffic light controlled intersections are replaced by precision timing. Cars would be staggered by about two cars lengths as they approached the intersection and would be timed such that they could pass through the intersection at full speed without colliding. Of course, the drivers would have to be removed from the loop entirely and every vehicle would have to be completely reliable. If it did work though, could you imagine passing mere meters from other vehicles travelling perpendicular to your vehicle all at a couple hundred km/h? Of course by then we'll all have jet-packs anyway, right? Right?!?
TFA suggests that it would be held up by air pressure. That means that, not only do you have to worry about snow, but there's also the problem that if enough panels break to lower the interior pressure the dome could collapse. Or in a high-wind scenario the Bernoulli effect could burst it. You're also right that obviously the surface area of the dome would result in truly absurd heating costs and I suspect really terrible AC costs in the summer (greenhouse effect!); Vermont really does get a lot of summer.
I don't know if they're being developed but I suspect that we'll see TVs/monitors that are capable of producing differently polarized light for each eye. It's much better system since you don't get the awful color distortion of the blue/orange system. It seems to me that it would be fairly easy to do since LCD screens already operate by manipulating the polarization of light to tune the intensity of each pixel. One more liquid crystal layer and a quarter-waveplate would do it so the technology is clearly there.
What they really need to do is define a version numbering scheme that results in a series that converges to v1.0. At the end of time it will be within an epsilon-neighborhood of being usable by the general public.
A scam involves dishonesty. DRMed content is sold with full disclosure with regards to how the format is crippled. It's poorly thought out and a scourge on the legal purchasers of copies of content but it's not a scam. EULA's are scam, an example of bait-and-switch, but DRM just sucks.
Obviously not, I could use openDNS, but I still disagree with the practice. I also just like any opportunity to say "Fuck you Bell" for any number of reasons (net neutrality, anti-competitive practices, low transfer caps, terrible prices, patchy connectivity and a terrible modem).
Fuck you Bell! Give me my NXDOMAIN back.
wait for prices to drop if I don't value it at it's current price
That's exactly how it should work, that's the foundational principle of economics.
I will occasionally download pirated software. This is generally software or music that I really don't value or only need to use once, and really doesn't hold enough value to me to justify paying the full price.
If it's not worth the sale price to you, don't buy it. It doesn't give you the moral right to pirate it.
I pirate stuff all the time out of pure, immoral self-interest; I don't justify it or sugar coat it. I often even feel bad about it.
Artists, authors, musicians, developers, etc. are absolutely free to publish works in the public domain. They do so frequently and it's a wonderful thing. The public domain was not stolen from the public, it's alive and well and is an option for everyone wanting to share ideas with the public.
I have no love of Big Content; they're a scourge. I also think that producers of intellectual content have the right to choose to not release works in the public domain and I think that should be respected.
I think you certainly can own a copy of copyrighted work, that's the idea behind copyright. Publishers can try to convince me that it's a license to use the content and not a copy and I'll continue to smile and nod.
Thanks for the link, I've made it through three chapters already. I still think that the position is utterly indefensible but I have a much clearer idea of what I'm disagreeing with. (Copyright reform, absolutely, but I still think abolition is completely wrong.) The authors have seven more chapters to convince me but so far I disagree with most of their key arguments. Anyway, thanks for the resource.
No one is entitled to violate copyrights because they disagree with the business model. They are entitled to simple abstain from buying (and therefore owning) the content.
What product would that be? The World of Goo payment experiment effectively demonstrated that when consumers can choose how much they want to pay for a valuable product they, for the most part, to pay far less than it's worth. I don't think piracy comes down to a quality issue with the product.
Don't like copyrights? Fine, write to your government representative. Don't like the product? Don't watch it. Piracy is not a statement; it's transparently self-serving and to claim otherwise is to delude yourself.
Big Content has to change it's business model, not because it's ethically wrong, but because people simply aren't going to stop violating copyrights because they're cheap.
Now I'm not saying that think that copyright is perfect. It isn't and it needs a serious reform but that isn't an excuse to violate it for your own interests.
So I've noticed. The position seems completely indefensible to me; I don't understand how people could be expected to a living producing ideas under such a system. Could you point me towards some literature supporting the viewpoint? I'm genuinely curious.