Hm... It's a little different with the Commodore Home Computers. You were practically forced to frickle around in the operating system. Even the booklet you got with the C= 64 had programming examples with lots of PEEK and POKE, where you were copying things from ROM, modifying them (most notably the character set) and switching parts of the ROMs off and on again to allow for bitwise graphics or to get the box to produce sounds.
There was a little bit of hardware abstraction in the I/O routines, which you could either use or also switch off. But then you had the bare metal to code on, and either you wrote your own I/O routines, or you were mirroring the ones you needed from I/O ROM into the RAM and modifying them.
In fact the computers hadn't a real OS in the original sense. There was no initial program whose task was to adminstrate all computer ressources and provide services to application programs running on top of them. There were said I/O routines, there was a boot loader that started the BASIC interpreter from ROM, and there were other ROMs with the character- and the graphic symbol set. You could use them directly, you could use them partly and add your own routines, or you could just ignore them and write your own routines.
That's completely different from a computer running Win XP. Win XP is a fullfledged OS. Either you have XP adminstrating all ressources on your computer, or you have to install another OS. There is no tinkering around with only parts from XP (lets say: Having only the drivers running, but calling them from your programs directly without the XP access mechanisms), there is a big abstraction layer above the XP core which you aren't able to look through.
Yes, the idea is somewhat similar to Feynman's model of the "sum over paths" in quantum electrodynamics. Even if the single statement is completely bogus, in the end contradictionary statements will cancel each other out, and statements supporting each other are adding up to a kind of "truth vector".
So following your opinion drawing a map of a dungeon as a guide to get out of it is false, because the dungeon shouldn't be here to begin with, and having a map of it finalizes its existance?
You are completely right. A case decided does not change anything, except it was decided by the highest courts. New decisions are published and discussed in juridical journals, but all this means is that there is something called "majority opinion" about how some of the cases should be decided. But a case decision following a "minority opinion" is as valid in the findings of law as a decision following the "majority opinion". So having an important case decided in a lower court and published and discussed in a juridical journal just means that most judges will take this decision as a kind of guideline for their own decisions. It somehow tilts the expectations of the outcome, but it is far from being final on the matter.
As someone who has seen the original German broadcast and is native german, Prof. Rotter actually said that the words were unintelligible, and one could understand it the way the U.S. translation did it, but any other interpretation was also possible.
If I remember correctly, what you were hearing was something along "rhubarber rhubarber", and it could have meant "I did it" but also "I approve of it" or "I know about it".
Incidently al-Qaida had claimed responsibility for the largest terrorist attacts on the U.S. before: the U.S.S. Cole and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Lets call it something along scientific trust. We trust a theory or a law as long as they don't let us down. But if they have failed us once, we never trust them again. We don't cry "My theory, my theory, why hast thou forsaken me?" and die. (Sorry, Mark 15,34). We move on.
First, many scientific theories are based on no evidence (string theory) and at this time we don't even know when they can be proven, if ever, but yet I'm sure many people can cite cases where universities are teaching string theory.
No scientific theory can be proven. We have always to expect new information or newly discovered facts to contradict scientific theories and finally to disprove them. And that's exactly the point. That makes a theory scientific. And yes, there might be facts that contradict String Theory. We just don't know them yet. And yes, there might be facts that contradict Evolution. If we ever find a halfly designed and then not finished model of a potential organism, which can not have lived this way, has no known predecessor and now known parallel, then we could hypothetize that a designer was at work (and didn't finish it).
Many theories are also based on assumptions that, given the human tendency to act holier-than-though, we think must be right or otherwise, God forbid, our theory might end up being wrong.
That was never a problem with a scientific theory. They often have proved to be wrong (then they got abandoned and replaced by other theories), or incomplete (then they have been extended) or being valid only for a very small subset of events (then they have been superseeded by a more general theory). The daily work of a scientist is not to find more evidence for a well established theory. More evidence you need only for a hypothesis, a not-yet-theory. The daily work of a scientist is crashtesting theories. Hit it with extreme conditions, with imaginative setups, with an alternate hypothesis, with better measurement. If you can poke a hole in a well established theory, a scientific price is not far away. If you find yet another evidence for a well established theory, all you get is a yawn from your colleagues.
But it's not all older games that thrive. It's a very, very small selection of older games, only about 5 oder 10 from all the games titles released from the beginning of computer games until 1990. But released were surely more than 10,000 games, which makes it less than a promille.
And so I guess, also a promille of the games titles of today will pass the test of time.
This is done by having an extremely simple open-source wrapper which is statically linked to x264; the raw frames to be encoded are passed to it over a pipe by the main program. This completely bypasses the limitations of the GPL without violating the spirit of it, since anyone who wants to can still read the source code of the wrapper, modify it, and recompile it as necessary and still use it with the main application.
Moreso, that is exactly how proprietary software is supposed to interact with GPL software. See Mere Aggregation, especially the last paragraph:
By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs.
If we substitute divine being for alien being, nothing changes in principle.
Everything changes. The alien hypothesis would lead immediately to further questions: - Was it a single visit, or several visits of the aliens? - If several, does a pattern emerge? - If several, were they the same aliens? Or did different types of alien visit us? - If several of the same type, can we detect a development in technology and goals of the aliens? - If a single visit, did they come and leave again, or are they still present? - If a single visit, can we determine when and where they landed? -...
All those questions can be handled scientificially. With an omnipotent being, none of those questions makes any sense.
Now, if we removed copyright, we would instantly see a drop in works from people who need money, or are just doing it for the money. There's no way of telling just how many people that is.
In Germany with its public health care system it's pretty easy to see: About 7500 people earn their living solely by being artists, because 7500 people are getting health care by paying into the Kuenstlersozialkasse (the social security for artists). That makes it 0,01 percent of the population. About half of those are musicians in some symphony orchestra.
It was always circumstantial. It was never just about preventing flawed, non-identical copies, it was about preventing copies, and preventing copies (flawed or not) requires knowledge of the circumstances.
I was thinking of something else. If it had the right editor or printer name written into the impressum, it was probably legit. If not, it was not.
The problem is that with the printing press copying was expensive (you had to overcome the initial cost somehow), and copiers had to recover the cost. That means: copying was (nearly everytime) a business, and the number of people who had the means to engage in copying was limited. Thus copyright was a win-win situation for everyone: printers were paying for copyrights to have something to print and sell legally, writers had an incentive to write stuff for the printing presses, readers got more and more stuff to read, cheaper than they ever could hope to make a copy for themselves, and everyone could tell by a look at the print if a copy is legit or not, making it easy to track down on illegitime printers. This situation is no longer a given. The amount of work of Arts is so immense, that no single person can ever hope to even have a look at the best 5%. Thus for the single person it is no longer important to foster the creation of new works of Art. Copy is cheap, and distribution is cheap, and the initial costs are nil, because systems bought for completely different tasks (gaming, email, websurfing...) are completely fit for the task of copying and distributing. Thus everyone is a potential copier. The definition of legal or illegal copies is becoming more and more circumstantial, it is no longer the object itself that reveals its own legality. It's the situation in which it got to you that makes the difference. So for the single person copyright makes less and less sense, because the existance of copyright does not affect the average person in a personal way anymore. If you not trying to become a paid creator, all copyright does is being confusing and getting in your way, because none of the former advantages is still a given.
More specific: There is an implicit assumption, that the single copy is only cheap if you are churning out lots of them. Copyright was never intended to punish people who copy it word by word with a pen. Copyright was intended to punish the people with the printing press, which is expensive (both the actual buying, but also the typesetting), but once bought, and the book typeset, it can create thousands of copies on the cheap.
It was not thought out for a situation where the first copy is already cheap.
It actually goes back to the early days of the artillery. A batterie (french, from battre = to fight) consists of two trains of two cannons each together with their teams of loaders, cannoniers and aimers.
Slashdot Mirror
Few other countries (civilized or otherwise) are as big as to be a Union of states.
Your definition of "civilized" may vary, but:
Russia is a Union of States.
Brasil is a Union of States.
Mexico is a Union of States.
Germany is a Union of States.
Austria is a Union of States.
The concept seems to be quite common.
Hm... It's a little different with the Commodore Home Computers. You were practically forced to frickle around in the operating system. Even the booklet you got with the C= 64 had programming examples with lots of PEEK and POKE, where you were copying things from ROM, modifying them (most notably the character set) and switching parts of the ROMs off and on again to allow for bitwise graphics or to get the box to produce sounds.
There was a little bit of hardware abstraction in the I/O routines, which you could either use or also switch off. But then you had the bare metal to code on, and either you wrote your own I/O routines, or you were mirroring the ones you needed from I/O ROM into the RAM and modifying them.
In fact the computers hadn't a real OS in the original sense. There was no initial program whose task was to adminstrate all computer ressources and provide services to application programs running on top of them. There were said I/O routines, there was a boot loader that started the BASIC interpreter from ROM, and there were other ROMs with the character- and the graphic symbol set. You could use them directly, you could use them partly and add your own routines, or you could just ignore them and write your own routines.
That's completely different from a computer running Win XP. Win XP is a fullfledged OS. Either you have XP adminstrating all ressources on your computer, or you have to install another OS. There is no tinkering around with only parts from XP (lets say: Having only the drivers running, but calling them from your programs directly without the XP access mechanisms), there is a big abstraction layer above the XP core which you aren't able to look through.
You're fricken old! My first was a Vic-20 but I didn't have access to the OS code at all.
You could get a commented ROM listing directly from Commodore. I had one for the C= 64.
AMD sponsors the Ferrari Formula-1 racing team, but I doubt Intel is sponsoring the Toyota team.
Yes, the idea is somewhat similar to Feynman's model of the "sum over paths" in quantum electrodynamics. Even if the single statement is completely bogus, in the end contradictionary statements will cancel each other out, and statements supporting each other are adding up to a kind of "truth vector".
So following your opinion drawing a map of a dungeon as a guide to get out of it is false, because the dungeon shouldn't be here to begin with, and having a map of it finalizes its existance?
You are completely right. A case decided does not change anything, except it was decided by the highest courts.
New decisions are published and discussed in juridical journals, but all this means is that there is something called "majority opinion" about how some of the cases should be decided. But a case decision following a "minority opinion" is as valid in the findings of law as a decision following the "majority opinion".
So having an important case decided in a lower court and published and discussed in a juridical journal just means that most judges will take this decision as a kind of guideline for their own decisions. It somehow tilts the expectations of the outcome, but it is far from being final on the matter.
I actually have a 140 HP VW Diesel engine in my car, and I love it. :) (And no, it's not a VW, it's a Skoda).
And terrorists should schedule their attacks better and coordinate with the news outlets to have them ready for primetime TV.
Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steropodon
and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teinolophos
and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotreme
Also here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morganucodon
Or here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docodonta
As someone who has seen the original German broadcast and is native german, Prof. Rotter actually said that the words were unintelligible, and one could understand it the way the U.S. translation did it, but any other interpretation was also possible.
If I remember correctly, what you were hearing was something along "rhubarber rhubarber", and it could have meant "I did it" but also "I approve of it" or "I know about it".
Incidently al-Qaida had claimed responsibility for the largest terrorist attacts on the U.S. before: the U.S.S. Cole and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
No. Dot-Com-Boom (Dot-Bomb-Boom) with Osama bin Ladin as a VC investor, who hopes to get a big bang for his buck.
Lets call it something along scientific trust. We trust a theory or a law as long as they don't let us down. But if they have failed us once, we never trust them again. We don't cry "My theory, my theory, why hast thou forsaken me?" and die. (Sorry, Mark 15,34). We move on.
The platypus a) works b) is thus finished c) has wellknown predecessors (mammal-like reptils).
First, many scientific theories are based on no evidence (string theory) and at this time we don't even know when they can be proven, if ever, but yet I'm sure many people can cite cases where universities are teaching string theory.
No scientific theory can be proven. We have always to expect new information or newly discovered facts to contradict scientific theories and finally to disprove them. And that's exactly the point. That makes a theory scientific.
And yes, there might be facts that contradict String Theory. We just don't know them yet.
And yes, there might be facts that contradict Evolution. If we ever find a halfly designed and then not finished model of a potential organism, which can not have lived this way, has no known predecessor and now known parallel, then we could hypothetize that a designer was at work (and didn't finish it).
Many theories are also based on assumptions that, given the human tendency to act holier-than-though, we think must be right or otherwise, God forbid, our theory might end up being wrong.
That was never a problem with a scientific theory. They often have proved to be wrong (then they got abandoned and replaced by other theories), or incomplete (then they have been extended) or being valid only for a very small subset of events (then they have been superseeded by a more general theory).
The daily work of a scientist is not to find more evidence for a well established theory. More evidence you need only for a hypothesis, a not-yet-theory. The daily work of a scientist is crashtesting theories. Hit it with extreme conditions, with imaginative setups, with an alternate hypothesis, with better measurement. If you can poke a hole in a well established theory, a scientific price is not far away. If you find yet another evidence for a well established theory, all you get is a yawn from your colleagues.
To me it's Alpha Centauri. Same Game Designer, same effect :)
But it's not all older games that thrive. It's a very, very small selection of older games, only about 5 oder 10 from all the games titles released from the beginning of computer games until 1990. But released were surely more than 10,000 games, which makes it less than a promille.
And so I guess, also a promille of the games titles of today will pass the test of time.
This is done by having an extremely simple open-source wrapper which is statically linked to x264; the raw frames to be encoded are passed to it over a pipe by the main program. This completely bypasses the limitations of the GPL without violating the spirit of it, since anyone who wants to can still read the source code of the wrapper, modify it, and recompile it as necessary and still use it with the main application.
Moreso, that is exactly how proprietary software is supposed to interact with GPL software. See Mere Aggregation, especially the last paragraph:
By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs.
If we substitute divine being for alien being, nothing changes in principle.
Everything changes. The alien hypothesis would lead immediately to further questions: ...
- Was it a single visit, or several visits of the aliens?
- If several, does a pattern emerge?
- If several, were they the same aliens? Or did different types of alien visit us?
- If several of the same type, can we detect a development in technology and goals of the aliens?
- If a single visit, did they come and leave again, or are they still present?
- If a single visit, can we determine when and where they landed?
-
All those questions can be handled scientificially. With an omnipotent being, none of those questions makes any sense.
Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science.
You can. Put a lightning rod on your roof and none of the roof of the church.
Now, if we removed copyright, we would instantly see a drop in works from people who need money, or are just doing it for the money. There's no way of telling just how many people that is.
In Germany with its public health care system it's pretty easy to see: About 7500 people earn their living solely by being artists, because 7500 people are getting health care by paying into the Kuenstlersozialkasse (the social security for artists). That makes it 0,01 percent of the population. About half of those are musicians in some symphony orchestra.
It was always circumstantial. It was never just about preventing flawed, non-identical copies, it was about preventing copies, and preventing copies (flawed or not) requires knowledge of the circumstances.
I was thinking of something else. If it had the right editor or printer name written into the impressum, it was probably legit. If not, it was not.
The problem is that with the printing press copying was expensive (you had to overcome the initial cost somehow), and copiers had to recover the cost. That means: copying was (nearly everytime) a business, and the number of people who had the means to engage in copying was limited.
Thus copyright was a win-win situation for everyone: printers were paying for copyrights to have something to print and sell legally, writers had an incentive to write stuff for the printing presses, readers got more and more stuff to read, cheaper than they ever could hope to make a copy for themselves, and everyone could tell by a look at the print if a copy is legit or not, making it easy to track down on illegitime printers.
This situation is no longer a given. The amount of work of Arts is so immense, that no single person can ever hope to even have a look at the best 5%. Thus for the single person it is no longer important to foster the creation of new works of Art. Copy is cheap, and distribution is cheap, and the initial costs are nil, because systems bought for completely different tasks (gaming, email, websurfing...) are completely fit for the task of copying and distributing. Thus everyone is a potential copier. The definition of legal or illegal copies is becoming more and more circumstantial, it is no longer the object itself that reveals its own legality. It's the situation in which it got to you that makes the difference. So for the single person copyright makes less and less sense, because the existance of copyright does not affect the average person in a personal way anymore. If you not trying to become a paid creator, all copyright does is being confusing and getting in your way, because none of the former advantages is still a given.
More specific: There is an implicit assumption, that the single copy is only cheap if you are churning out lots of them. Copyright was never intended to punish people who copy it word by word with a pen. Copyright was intended to punish the people with the printing press, which is expensive (both the actual buying, but also the typesetting), but once bought, and the book typeset, it can create thousands of copies on the cheap.
It was not thought out for a situation where the first copy is already cheap.
It actually goes back to the early days of the artillery. A batterie (french, from battre = to fight) consists of two trains of two cannons each together with their teams of loaders, cannoniers and aimers.